rat 


ae : : uy 
‘ ¥ oa 
; ‘ 
: 4 
* ( . > 
. 4 
, 
i : i 
1% es 
a =k 
M * * ~*~ = 
qT, > S MES r ‘ 4 
gas a 8 ee eee ee nega wit we es he : 
. . aN é 
4 j % 
> 
f : 
; : . 
E 
nN 
* £ 
x ¥ 
y * 4 
> 
. : 3 
. i 
“ a % _ 
“Sa Mandi ring * Pe * ms E <“e, . ™ 
j 3 ; 
: ‘ 
a 2 
¥i $ 3 5 Be gy “ " Be x 
; 3 ee : : . 2 ; 
J bs : ¥ i 4 < ~ : 
~b « ; ae y 
, as 4 3 . 
rT ? ; 2 i 
: = « % a 
is * ; ; 
5 i 4% 
= y S.> F 
Bs : - = : 


=e . OES eh » 
eee OE aan 7 e a Wed PRPS el STR. : tat 


_— » eit + he a” 
a - oc cee 3 —-* e Pe ee a Me c ae » - Pog ae < 5 Soy 
e we 
5 ° 
4 z > 
F 
r 
° * x ™ - 


43 


fe 


¥ 
re 


ne : ees 5 , . ay {dang ee 
r - . ae ‘ Sa ‘ 2) ey a Pad Cae ie 3 
» a , \ aw ‘ 4 = tees! i. aibe 4 a ee Be 


DU. eT 


Ce eee 


> 


Ae 


. 
es 
a 


‘ 
7 4 
ete 
Cie a. 
a 


ae 


te, Fah 
a7) 
es 


Titre of oP. Y i 
Pt 94> 4) . 
7 he 
; 2 
‘ 7 
’ 
le 


ne : 


eS, 


a 
f 


: rie & - 
P| - ,. = =» . - 
THT.MOAT Talay Davo!) taoase/ .e ard 
" : : i: es a! fe . 

(oi. prin Wh 2 


° 
a Pi 
: i , ‘ ree ‘, a a is ; 
, : Fic. 9. Narvo pt Crone: Curist From THE Parapi 
eg . S. Maria Novella, Florence 


STUDIES IN FLORENTINE PAINTING 


THe FouRTEENTH CENTURY 


BY 
RICHARD OFFNER 


NEW YORK 
FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN 


MCMXXVII 


ht, 1927, by 


Freperic Farrcuitp SHERMAN 


. 


C 


To THE MEMoRY OF 
My FaTruer 


Reb eA Gel 


HE following studies, which are by-products of research extending 
far beyond their own limits, first saw the light separately, at odd 
intervals and in various places, as the material presented in them united 
in clear conclusions. Almost entirely rewritten since and enlarged, 
neither intrinsic interest nor aesthetic importance determined the 
choice of their contents — which in a sense may be said to have selected 
themselves — but, first, the susceptibility of scattered or unidentified — 
paintings to cluster in stylistically coherent groups. Some of the 
studies are devoted to familiar figures, but almost all of them consider 
masters hitherto known barely by name, or not at all, as for example 
Pacino di Bonguida, the Fogg Master, Jacopo del Casentino, Antonio 
Veneziano, Niccolo di Tommaso. If this be a justification of their 
second appearance, they have been brought together here on the convic- 
tion also that the binding principle of a given individual style remains 
an undetermined resemblance until the works it masses are seen in a 
longer alignment. Only then do the disparities between master and 
master isolate and define him, and fix his position in the whole field. 
But by dealing with the material in this way, the ground is also cleared 
of stray growths, and the main features of the historical panorama 
sharpened towards a truer view of a still shadowy period. 

The validity of the individual integrations and of the historical 
prospect generally, however, would depend on an attention—and I 
may say a conscience as well — so scrupulous and refined as to im- 
mobilize one’s own parti-pris, thereby securing one against the temp- 
tation of forcing fact to one’s whims or ends, or of imposing conven- 
tional categories upon it. 

But, if the material is thus objectively dealt with, the different per- 
sonalities here assembled, nevertheless reveal a certain rational rela- 
tion by separating themselves in three groups, to represent the three 
cardinal tendencies of Florentine painting in the fourteenth century. 

The integration of each personality is undertaken, as I have said, 
on the basis — the only real basis — of style. In order to allow the sty- 
listic fact its own way, and to its fullest extent, external evidence has 
been conceded an authority limited properly by the nature and degree 
of its relevance in each case. As every case is unique, such testimony, 


Vv 


literary or other, has had to be measured by all the circumstances lying 
around the individual problem. 

To the same end — or rather to compass it more directly — and in 
defiance of academic objection, those isolated features, in which be- 
trayals of style are more concentrated and seizable, have been brought 
together on a single page to summarize it, and so shorten the labor of 
the student. 

The stages and the principles implicit in reconstruction are dis- 
cussed more fully in the essay on Method, but in order to free the 
presentation of both problem and conclusion from the perplexities and 
elusiveness of verbal argument, and to secure the concrete image 
against factitious elaboration or simplification, as much as possible of 
the material is given in illustrations. 

But if verbal proof has been limited, it has been found necessary 
to reinforce the conclusiveness of the evidence offered in the illustra- 
tions, by verbal indications of points of critical analogy. I have piled 
these up on the principle that the validity of proof increases with the 
number of such analogies — just as the correctness of the time on a 
clock is established more conclusively with every additional instance 
of agreement. 

An enterprise such as this, modest as it doubtless is, involves exten- 
sive photographic material, that has had to be gathered under all man- 
ner of difficulties. ‘The greater, therefore, my appreciation of the gen- 
erosity of all those, too many to mention here, who have facilitated my 
labors through gifts of photographs, or permitted their reproduction. 
Among these I want particularly to thank Miss Helen Frick, Mr. 
Bernard Berenson, Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, Miss Belle Greene, Mr. 
Adolphe Stoclet, Mr. Chas. Loeser, Mr. Carl Hamilton, Mr. Percy 
Straus, Prof. Paul J. Sachs, Mr. Edward Forbes, Capt. Langton Doug- 
las, the Detroit Institute of Art, Comm. Giov. Poggi, Mrs. Walker D. 
Hines. 

My much deeper debt, to many who, since the initiation of these 
researches, have through friendly intercourse (to speak of nothing else) 
enriched the substance of this book, is still harder adequately to ac- 
knowledge. And the hardest of all to Mr. Bernard Berenson, of whose 
accomplishment every student of Italian Art, and of criticism general- 
ly, bears reverent recognition. To his stimulus, to the quality of his 
culture, to his penetration, to the accessibility of his incomparable li- 
brary, I have owed endless profit and inspiration from the early stages 
of my study. 


And I have not forgotten, since those first bright Florentine days, 
how much I derived from the friendship and knowledge of Mr. F. 
Mason Perkins and from the refined scholarship of the lamented Prof. 
Max Dvorak. 

I am under various shades and kinds of obligation again to the Frick 
Art Reference Library, to the Sachs Fellowship, to Mr. Maitland F. 
Griggs, Mr. and Mrs. Percy S. Straus; and finally to the interest and 
counsel of Mr. Frederic F. Sherman, who has been at no end of pains 
and expense to give this book an adequate form. 


RicHARD OFFNER. 


New York University, Juty 21, 1926. 


NOTE 


The following titles, which are those most frequently re- 
ferred to, will be abbreviated as below, the number of the vol- 
ume indicated by a Roman numeral to precede the page, thus: 
Vasari, I, 695. The place or date of publication in special in- 
stances will precede the volume number. 


Vasari — Giorgio Vasari, Vite dei piu eccellenti pittori, archi- 
tettori et scultori etc.; ed. Sansoni (with notes by 
Gaetano Milanesi), Florence, 1902. 


Crowe and Cavalcaselle — Crowe and Cavalcaselle, A History 
of Painting in Italy, ed. Murray, London, 1903. 


Suida — Wilhelm Suida, Florentinische Maler um die Mitte 
des XIV Jahrhunderts, ed. Heitz, Strassburg, 1906. 


Venturi — Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell ’arte Italiana, ed. Hoepli, 
Milan, 1907. 


Testi— Laudedeo Testi, Storia della pittura Veneziana, ed. 
Arti Grafiche, Bergamo, 1912. 


Sirén — Osvald Sirén, Giotto and Some of his Followers, ed. 
Harvard University Press, Cambridge (U.S.A.), 1917. 


Van Marle — Raymond Van Marle, The Development of the 
Italian Schools of Painting, ed. Nijhoff, the Hague, 
1923, vol. III. 


S. P. — Refers to the specimen pages showing details from the 
works of the several masters (with one exception) and 
designed as a pictorial synopsis of individual style. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


Const A Eee eee et ieee ane as te See ae ee V 
EERO N Me foo cbye wk epi ce se RL Se hen, Pee Se I 
Part ONE 
eestor OF PACINO DI BONAGUIDA . . . «. . «© » . =: 3 
Meter ERC ASENTINO 7) 3. te 28d 
Bee SOUPPEREDEDLA |... 3 1°. 2 we 8 we wk we AB 
Part Two 
SereveestuR OFTHE FOGG PIETA’. = 1... fw AO 
Two Unknown Pictures sy TappEo GAppDI. . . . . . . 59 
Tue Panets or ANTONIO VENEZIANO ......... «6 
Serer ie DIETROGERINIGS 5°. ¢ se las ee «83 


Part THREE 


MME COLON Featsit arch eh ek AN ee ge es Vt OF 
Nicco.o p1 TomMMAso AND THE Rinucctn1 Master . . . . 109 
PANAOUTUINE OF A lt1nORY OF METHOD . . 5. . . . . . . 127 
MopeiuEy ARTISTS AND AUTHORS . 2 2°29. 0). . . . 2.137 
tO S PACES 15.25) ire Sete ies pa oe oe ere ee TAG 


PONT Stee Fd se Lec it al et eee Gn rode e ren ee ei LAS 


II 


12 


13 
14 
15 
16 
17 
18 
19 
20 


21 


lS Oils TRATIONS 


Nardo di Cione: Christ. From the Paradise. S. Maria Novella, 


BotcHcem 2 gre ara). +r Ul ahslecs Lape.” (on eee na oe oe LEE romtispiéce 
Page 
Pacino di Bonaguida: The Crucifixion. (Part of Diptych). Collection 
Bamvicw jesse) otraus, New York. 3... 3 2. 4 woe % 3 
Details from the Works of Pacino di Bonaguida . . . . 22 
Pacino di Bonaguida: St. Nicholas. (Detail from the Paty oureh: Ast. 
emmy riorence.. . (.-. ty 22 


Pacino di Bonaguida: St. BunhGlower, (Detail cam He Pal eee: 
Academy, Florence. . . ce pee 2 re Re ee 22 


Pacino di Bonaguida: Detail from ae Tree of Life. Academy, Florence 22 
Pacino di Bonaguida: The Nativity from the Tree of Life. Academy, 


BuGrencenn) SP aes, oe ey) 
Pacino di Bonaguida: The Crucifixion en Re Tree if Life. Academy, 

Florence . . eure, 222 
Pacino di Beatie: pine ape St. Nicholas in ah Polyptych. 

Academy, Florence, . . eee it) 22 
Pacino di Bonaguida: The Nee ee ie Tree of Life. eae 

Florence. . 22 
Pacino di Bonaguida: eteee bel Child. clean of Mr. Charles 

Loeser, Florence. . . 22, 
Pacino di Bonaguida: Detail of fie Crucifixion i in SN: fpstarease ete 

emy, Florence . . ies he 
Shop of Pacino di far aRREE Small rcatch Tienes Tis ere eae 
Pacmo di Bonapuida: Crucifix. S.Felicita, Florence. .... « . 22 
Pacino di Bonaguida: Madonna, SS. Francis and Lawrence. Fondazione 

Home, Florence . - ny Ee) Deas Gee es Ee eee ee VE eel a eae ey 
Milieu of Pacino di Reeds Small Triptych. Museo Bandini, 

ICSOIES Gu G -. Series 2 
Pacino di Bonaguida Uvaeehy ree ra fhe Life of Christ. The 

J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York . . . eet) = 22 
Pacino di Bonaguida (Assisted): Leaf from the Life of Christ. The 

J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York . . .. . 22 
Follower of Pacino di Bonaguida: Detail of an Illuminated Leaf, Cok 

lection of Mr. Frank C. Smith, Worcester, Mass... . 22 
Jacopo del Casentino: S. Miniato and Scenes from his Life. Church of 

Den Wintatom Dlorencen a, fans i erties ete a eee | £23 


Details from the Paintings of Jacopo del Cente ee ee! sg gs A 


22 


23 
24 


25 
25 


26 
27 


28 
29 


30 
31 


a2 
33 


34 
35 
36 
a7, 
38 
39 
40 
AI 
42 


43 
44 


45 


Jacopo del Casentino: Triptych. Collection of Don Guido Cagnola, 
Milan SENET Sh aes 
Jacopo del Casentino: Madonna. Fondazione Horne, Florence 


Jacopo del Casentino: Detail of Large Sg Palazzo dell’Arte 
della lana, Florence 


Jacopo del Casentino: Dormition of the Virgin. Collection of Mr. 


Charles Loeser, Florence . 


Jacopo del Casentino: St. Bae ne pec Uffizi Gallery, 
Florence 


Jacopo del Casentino: ‘St. Nicholas. erases of Fine ye Floneee ‘ 
Jacopo del Casentino: Crucifixion. Collection of the late Prof. Allan 
Marquand, Princeton, N. J. . oa keene ee 
Jacopo del Casentino: Virgin and Angels. Madonna di Piazza, Scarperia 
Jacopo del Casentino: Detail of Altarpiece. Church of S. Miniato, 
Florence PEATE WSS 3 . 
Jacopo del Casentino: stias from He Ree of S. Ninate Church 
of S. Miniato, Florence . 0 he SE 
Jacopo del Casentino: Scene from the Se of S. Miniato. Church 
of S. Miniato, Florence . : aloe 
Jacopo del Casentino: Triptych. The Bae Collecuen Vine : 


Follower of Bernardo Daddi: Virgin Swooning over the Savior’s Tomb. 
Staten’s Museum, Copenhagen . aeereaher es < ) S 

Follower of Bernardo Daddi: The Pieta. Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, 
Berlin ; 

Follower of Bernardo Daddi: The Nativity. Collection of Mr. Phi 
Lehman, New York . “te 

Bernardo Daddi: Episodes from the Legend. of the Sacred Girdle. Pa- 
lazzo Communale, Prato . 

Orcagna: Details of tees! Strozzi Chane S. ves Noval 
Florence 

Orcagna: Angel ne Polyptch guise Chapa S. Maria Noval 
Florence 

Orcagna: Detail of Predella to pene ents Chapel, S. Maria 
Novella, Florence : ; 

The Fogg Museum Pieta. The ees oe Nines Canbates Make ; 

Details from the Paintings of the Master of the Fogg Pieta . 

Master of the Fogg Pieta: King David. Museum, Rennes . 

Master of the Fogg Pieta: Crucifix. Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence . 

Master of the Fogg Pieta: Mourning Virgin. (Fragment of a Crucifix). 
Collection of Mr. F. Mason Perkins, Florence . 


Master of the Fogg Pieta: St. Francis. The Worcester Art Museu 
Worcester, Mass. 


42 
42 


42 
42 


42 
42 


42 
42 


42 
42 


42 
42 


43 
43 
43 
43 
48 
48 
48 
49 
58 
58 


58 


58 


58 


46 
47 
48 
49 


50 
SI 


(se) 
53 
54 
55 
56 
57 


58 
59 
60 
61 
62 


63 
64 


65 


66 
67 


68 
69 
70 


Wa 


72 


Master of the Fogg Pieta: St. sate The Worcester Art Museum, 
Worcester, Mass. = 


Master of the Fogg Pieta: Detail of Virgin on the Crucifix. sae 
S. Croce, Florence . : 

Master of the Fogg Pieta: Detail of ae Crucified on the Crucifix. 
Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence . 

Master of the Fogg Pieta: Detail of St. Be ie e Brangel, on the 
Crucifix, Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence . : SE. 5 

Giotto: Detail of Altarpiece. Uffizi Gallery, ee , 


Master of the Fogg Piet’: Madonna, Saints and a Duomo, 
Figline 


Taddeo Gaddi: Metoee el Child. S. Lorenzo alle Rose . 

Details from the Works of Taddeo Gaddi . 

Taddeo Gaddi: Adoration. Academy, Florence . : 

Taddeo Gaddi: Detail from Legend of Job. Camposanto, Pisa 

Taddeo Gaddi: Madonna and Angels. Uffizi Gallery, Florence . 

Taddeo Gaddi: St. John, the Evangelist. Collection of Mr. Philip 
Gentner, Worcester, Mass. 

Antonio Veneziano: SOOT of the Virgin. Convent of S. Tom- 
maso, Pisa . 

Details from the Paintings of Antonio Veneziano . pes iNet ° 

Antonio Veneziano: Last Judgment (Detail). Tabernacle, Nuovoli 

Antonio Veneziano: Two Saints. Collection of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, 
New York . ene step eee i heme Ae 

Antonio Veneziano: Coronation of the Virgin. Collection of Mr. Rich- 
ard M. Hurd, New York . ib ae es eee 

Antonio Veneziano: Refection of S. Ranieri. Camposanto, Pisa . 

Antonio Veneziano: Madonna and Angels. Kestner Museum, Han- 
nover, Germany . 

Antonio Veneziano: Madonna and aoe (Desi. Kestner Museum, 
Hannover, Germany 

Antonio Veneziano: St. Paul. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence 

Antonio Veneziano: Madonna and Child. The Museum of Fine Arts, 
Boston, Mass. 

Antonio Veneziano: St. Peter. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence 

Antonio Veneziano: St. James. University Gallery, Gottingen, Germany 

Antonio Veneziano: Miracle of Separation of the Wine from the Water. 
(Detail). Camposanto, Pisa a etek. Pes. ret 4 a ee 

Antonio Veneziano: The Scurging of Christ. (Detail). Church of S. 
Niccold Reale, Palermo . mR eae eee ee ret ae P 

Antonio Veneziano: The Embarcation. (Detail). Camposanto, Pisa . 


58 
58 
58 


58 
58 


58 


59 
66 


66 
66 
66 


66 
67 
82 
82 


82 


82 
82 


82 


82 
82 


82 
82 
82 


82 


82 
82 


Antonio Veneziano: The Miracle of the Wine and the Water. (Detail). 
Camposanto, Pisa 


Antonio Veneziano: St. ee (Detail). Church of S. Niccold, 
Palermo 


Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: St. KES. in WINS, ae ieee Gardaee 
Museum, Fenway Court, Boston, Mass. Mei) > 


Details from the Paintings of Niccold di Pietro Gerini . 


Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: Madonna and Child, Collection of Mr. Neste 
A. Ryerson, Chicago, Illinois . 


Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: Madonna and Child. “The Museum of Fine 
Arts, Boston, Mass. 


Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: Entombment. Academy of Fine Arts, Florence 
Niccold di Pietro Gerini: Crucifix. Church of S. Croce, Florence . 
Niccolé di Pietro Gerini: Trinity. Or San Michele, Florence . 


Niccold di Pietro Gerini: Madonna and Child. S. Lorenzo in Vincigliata. 
(Near Florence) 


Nardo di Cione: Triptych. Calas of Mr. Hee Gola New 
bY OTK. oe Le sla Wet Wie ef ok ke thei, 8 roe ue ee eee 
Details from the Paintings of Nardo di Cione . Ee 
Nardo di Cione: St. eae the ee Yale University, New Haven, 
Conn. : nae + he alos ee 
Nardo di Cione: St. Peter. Yale Univenatye New Haven, Conn. . 


Nardo di Cione: Virgin and Child from Altarpiece. New York His- 
torical Society, New York wah oes yee aly ie a er 

Nardo di Cione and Assistants: Saints. Alte Pinakotek, Munich, 
Germany a ik 

Nardo di Cione: SS. John, a Eeeeaies Joe, is Bans, a James, 
National Gallery, London : 


Nardo di Cione: Virgin and Child. Collection Mr. Herschel Vv. Tone 
Minneapolis, Minn. 


Follower of Nardo di Cione: Christ j in Tomb. The pies Canes 
New York . 


Niccolé di Tommaso: Adam and Eve. cee del rT, Pistoia ; 
Details from the Paintings of Niccolo di Tommaso . 
Details from the Paintings of the Rinuccini Master . 


Niccolo di Tommaso: The Temptation and The oak Convento 
del T, Pistoia . 


Niccolo di Tommaso: St. James. Collection of Mr. Moailliad Fr. Griggs, 
New York . 


Niccolé di Tommaso: The Gonna eae of Fine Aen Wigeaes 


Niccolo di Tommaso: Detail of St. John, the Evangelist. Fondazione 
Horne. Florence 


82 
82 


83 
96 


96 


96 
96 
96 
96 


96 


97 
108 


108 
108 


108 
108 
108 
108 
108 
109 
126 
126 


126 


126 
126 


126 


D9 


100 
IOI 
102 
103 


104 
105 


106 


107 


108 


109 


IIO 
Ili 


112 


Niccolé di Tommaso: St. John, the Evangelist. Fondazione Horne, 
Florence’ . .: bE Oe 


Niccolo di Tommaso: St. Paul. Eola vione Horne, Florence . 
Niccolo di Tommaso: Detail of St. Anthony. S. Antonio Abate, Nate 
Niccolé di Tommaso: The Nativity. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome . 
Niccolo di Tommaso: Tabernacle. The Johnson Collection, Phila- 
delphia, Penn. : , 
Niccolo di Tommaso: Prerch: Church of S, Neate pie Nici : 
Giovanni da Milano: Detail of Saints in Altarpiece. Uffizi Gallery, 
Florence TOE Base ee ee ee orr, be 
Giovanni da Milano: Birth of ie Visi, Pee Chapel, S. Croce, 
Florence os is eee Rare oe ae 
The Rinuccini Niner: Nias of re Virgin, Rinuccini Chapel, S. 
Croce, Florence a : 4 
The Rinuccini Master: Detail of ie eda of ne Vien Church 
of S. Croce, Florence ; 
The Rinuccini Master: Detail of the Magic of is Virgin CHunt of 
S. Croce, Florence : BE «ey ha Fi 
The Rinuccini Master: Palvpeych, peaieae Toes ‘ 
The Rinuccini Master: St. Barnard and Disciples. (Detail of Predella 
to Polyptych). Academy of Fine Arts, Florence . . : 
The Rinuccini Master: Scene from the Life of St. John, the edie: 
(Detail of Predella to Polyptych). Academy of Fine Arts, Florence 


126 
126 
126 
126 


126 
126 


126 


126 


126 


126 


126 
126 


126 


126 


INTRODUCTON 


DS ea the most persistent fallacy in the criticism of Florentine 
painting is the uncensored belief that the fourteenth century is 
divided between Giotto and his followers. However close to the truth 
the theory of isolated scholars may have been, their practice seems in- 
variably to be at the mercy of this error. At present all that is being 
willingly admitted of this period, is that Giotto was its initiator and 
Siena the source of a transfiguring influence. Misled by the Giot- 
tesque prejudice, students have been giving too little place to that in- 
fluence, have underrated it, and worse, they have almost entirely neg- 
lected the non-Giottesque painting of this moment. 

If Giotto may be said to have found the mightiest artistic embodi- 
ment for spiritual significance, his school is by no means coextensive 
with the Florentine painting of the time. There is, in fact, a tendency 
in Florence opposed to the Giottesque genius in taste, and actively op- 
posed to its stark statement, its heroic system and its intellectualism, 
a tendency, nevertheless, strong and deep and persistent within the 
school. Giotto’s art by idealizing action and psychology chilled the 
spontaneous human sympathies; by its structural balance, it arrested 
the mobility of life, and burdened the sensibilities by its monumental 
weight. 

Approaching the world by way of an ingenuous and sentimental 
empiricism the masters of the non-Giottesque tendency wanted to 
create the illusion of life by exploiting a pantomime more explicit than 
the averaged face and gesture of the Giotteschi, to present an action 
with a more impulsive and unrehearsed air. They wanted to render 
things in their flux and catch the sparkle on their surface. And more 
naturally sensible of the principle of change in the world, than of its 
eternity, they preferred to follow the unfolding of a story, in the for- 
tunes of its personages. By the temperament implicit in this pref- 
erence, they avoided the dramatic, for drama means imposing an ar- 
bitrary system of ethics, and an inflexible logic, upon the events of life, 
which flow on without a regulated rise and fall. 

As old and older than the Giottesque revolution, this current in 
Florentine painting rises in a still undefined, obscure, partly Roman 
source, and first appears in the works of the St. Cecily Master. The 
first three essays in the book review this tradition, and deal repre- 

I 


sentatively with it, establishing its claim to being indigenous by its 
persistence through Daddi, in a steady course to Angelico, and finally 
down to Bacchiacca. 

The second group of essays dealing with masters known slightly or 
not at all before, lays nevertheless a reasonable claim to being represen- 
tative. The four figures that make it up are fair impersonations of the 
cast and drift of the Giottesque succession from the middle of the cen- 
tury down to its sad decline. 

The first two of these, formed probably by Giotto himself, illustrate 
a moment when the air was still alive with his creative energy. Rude, 
uninspired repetitious but lusty, the other two belong to the descend- 
ing slope of the Trecento, when only a certain Giottesque starkness of 
statement and a certain sense of physical and dramatic pondus, sur- 
vive the great master. 

The third group is held together by its poetic tendency. Originally 
essentially uncongenial to the Florentine temper, its lyricism seems to 
have been given definite form by the gradual infiltration of foreign in- 
fluence. To judge by the frequent call of Sienese artists to this city 
ever since Duccio was commissioned to paint the Rucellai Madonna, 
Florence must have regarded this exquisite art a welcome release from 
the difficult beauties of its own. In forming the lyricism of Nardo di 
Cione, Sienese painting left perhaps no less of its refinement, of its 
song in it, than in even so Sienizing a master as Daddi. For while there 
is a good deal in Daddi that harks back to the Lorenzetti, a large part 
conventionally accounted for in this way, is in reality appropriated 
from Florentine sculpture. But Nardo seems to have caught some- 
thing of the very genius that shines out of the early Trecento Sienese 
pictures. His Sienese appropriations however do not end there. The 
rendering of the soft consistency of the flesh under the close-fitting 
dresses of his women, and of the narrow eye, urge us toward the same 
source. His statement, however, and his skeleton are Giottesque. 

Niccolo di Tommaso and The Rinuccini Master are prolongations 
in different directions of a lyricism, that varies only as Nardo varies 
from his brother Orcagna, the former being responsible for Niccolo to 
about the same extent as the latter was for the Rinuccini Master. 

The three painters integrated and discussed in the third group, 
isolate a note, which though it rises out of forms and an idiom inalien- 
ably Florentine, constitutes a tendency within Florentine painting, 
that establishes its independence by its continuity in Lorenzo Monaco 
and Botticelli. 


\ 
: 

ca 

4 
= | 
‘ sd 
: 
4 44 
j ta 


ee 
) Shales — ori 
t é P 
+ 


rr 


it 
- > 


é y 
Na 


ee Ae Pech Ha bo 


HCE | Se eh tua 
alia iit Ti tae Ot Ft ore | 


a as ‘ 


if 


7 
3 
, 

; : 


: 

o! 
AA hy ax 

4 


; 


fi 
e 


tes : ; 


se ee : at | 9 a ry > ; : A : nie ‘ 
: >, . : + = ren ; 4 : Wa - ; ‘1M 


jh sedaa, A 


re 


; 
a 
: 
: 
i 
” 
i 


SMS SN RL ITS 


ca 
1 ahaa eng reaenananipn hipametang-nteror n Ser <ebtaptieh -teagigitinilan sere emen 


PLE ONT CPR ete tenet Bld e+ 
TR | ORR OF TE yeh 


im are . mS € TE ESHOP CoP F AA: t* .; & 7h 4 


World scorns all Antewindygs jp oed me dy wid 
: lightens the Uap | mt giao: Pear oxy 
ceranen & name —~ hws hewn manile ir perience Phe we 
‘ tat ¢ has been imapatrenty. jie < 4 i 2 : 
a we es: thins frced wk. ier ieee we pt MP 
ie web a ipaeen hak: and <add? ' 
ey Slee alee) ere ey 
ee ‘tre ihe! «ee arbi yy = aed ’ 
satioaiiiasadiaaiiiaeiaasat laa . | 
% poe ‘ ‘ ciel Geokciel’: ape have Woun , 
(aa enn. aga r sles Jd , 
| co al , dis 
te 3 ss Magma —, pa th « pe > a T sie ie Me paman Ad ard 
sink ws bak oo ee ! K stzah AML fo soiiga\lo) 


' . Sivoariy a8 04 as 
mn apenas iia jd ae the bors af 
oe Ee oe 

es pine Prema or Pacino ig.a polye- 
ad ee Paaehe Hy whetes’ veBerrnn «be 
“a nie ihe Pig a} ty aitemied 


THE SHOP OF PACINO DI BONAGUIDA 


a world scorns all knowledge beyond its reach, and because 
scorn lightens the imputation of ignorance, Pacino — hitherto 
little more than a name — has been made its special object. The most 
recent literature has been impatiently justifying its position by the at- 
tribution of works that fitted whatever chance notion it happened to 
hold of him.” This was made easy and tacitly sanctioned by the two- 
fold fact, that antiquity is altogether silent about him® and that he was 
entirely eclipsed by his greater contemporaries, who were engaged in 
one of the most critical revolutions of form in history. And, to be sure, 
Pacino is neither a mighty creative figure, still less a determining in- 
fluence, and subsequent painting would probably not have been ma- 
terially different without him. But by adding to the two only admis- 
sible works,* and relieving him of a number unintelligently assigned to 
him, one is enabled at last to recognize in him a distinct gift, the light, 
fresh fluent gift of the minstrel, and one of the principal figures in a 
significant tendency in Florentine painting. 

Milanesi’ is the first to drag him into modern art-historical litera- 
ture with the publication of two documents, one under the date 1303, 
the other of a time soon after 1320. These two dates tend to stabilize his 
chronology: he is, presumably, mature and has been active for some 
time in 1303, and the appearance of his name after 1320 invites the 
conjecture of activity for some time to come. A contemporary of 
Giotto, then, possibly a younger contemporary, he is probably as old as 
any of Giotto’s known or acknowledged pupils, and on the basis of 
dates alone, it is unlikely he was of their number.° 

The monument radical for the reconstruction of Pacino is a polyp- 
tych in five compartments at the Florentine Academy’ wherein the 
central and dominant tragedy of the Crucifixion (Fig. 1) is attended 
by Sts. Nicholas (Fig. 2) and Bartholomew (Fig. 3) on the left, 
Florentius (S. P. 7) and Luke on the right. It bears his autograph and 
the year of its painting,” the only one among his works furnishing 
either of these data. A poetic but timid performance, it holds a spatial 
rather than a formal sense, suggestion rather than concentration, sen- 
timent rather than passion. The height of the crucifix and of the 
flanking figures of Mary and John dwarf the principal actor and the 


3 


dramatic motive, and the representation thus sacrifices its inherent 
grandeur. The conduct of Mary and John is not a reflex to an im- 
mediately present or imminent calamity, but the emotional epilogue to 
an event already past. Our Crucifixion throws up the lyric aspect of 
feeling, not the dramatic — it has become a lament, and has ceased to 
be action. And the summarized aesthetic of these distinguishing char- 
acters assimilates it to the symbolic representation of the formal cruci- 
fix, with Mary and John, in all respects — excepting their position — 
corresponding to the terminal figures on the cross-bar. 

Its composition’ is of a series which seems to have gone out of fash- 
ion with the second half of the century, somewhat later chiefly favored 
by Daddi. Here Pacino constructs neither with knowledge nor with 
understanding: the line is uncertain and the form flat. The figures 
sink against the ground without a sense of the easy and vital resistance 
to the pull of gravitation. They could easily be blown over. Their 
movements are gentle and they have a mild anxious look. The pro- 
portions vary from that of the tall Virgin,” with small eyes and long 
face, to the short St. Bartholomew. The high-crowned heads rest 
loosely on rounded and narrow shoulders, and the faces of the men 
are heavy-jowled with flat or bulging foreheads. The lips are soft and 
clean-edged. The noses of John and the Virgin indicate the limits of 
two varying types. The drapery is thrown into long, curved, narrow, 
shallow, sweeping ridges. The uncommonly large halos and broad 
border edged with tiny rosettes that are tooled with faint foliations 
against a ground of cross-hatching, make a unified surface barely dis- 
tinguishable from the rest of the gold ground. Finally the original 
color survives mainly in the green underpainting which neutralizes 
what the modern cleaner has left of the local color. 

As usual, one is surprised in passing to the medallions in the pin- 
nacles at the disparities between the monumental and the miniature 
modes. The style becomes tighter and more concentrated and the 
master a more seizable personality. It is by the way of these (S. P. 
13, 14) that one first comes to recognize the same hand in the Tree of 
Life on the opposite wall.” 

The force of the conviction that this picture is by Pacino would 
depend on the ability to surround him with the contemporary artistic 
ambient in Florence. The patient and susceptible attention however 
will see under apparent divergencies of style and of state, the aesthetic 
complex of the former of these paintings, in the other. The touch, the 
line, shape, the peace of the Crucified in both pictures (Fig. 3, 4), the 


4 


mould of the mask, the nose, the hollows of the eyes, the closed lids will 
then seem to hold differences of degree only, differences presumably 
of period. To instance the most obvious resemblances, the hands of 
our Christ repeat the left of the St. Luke and the mouth, chin and 
beard, the lower part of St. Bartholomew’s face (Fig. 3). To carry the 
proof to the miniatures it would be enough to set the St. John (bottom 
right in the Tree of Life) beside the prophet (Fig. 4) above the St. 
Nicholas of the polyptych. The head of this same St. John is in inner 
agreement with that of the St. Florentius; and the head of God, the 
Father, above the central compartment of the polyptych has the very 
shape of almost any one of Pacino’s frontal heads. Rings of tiny 
rosettes edge the halos as in the polyptych, and the gold background at 
the top is tooled with the same superficial tracery. 

The Tree of Life” blossoms with a multitude of small scenes, four 
on each of its twelve branches, representing the life of Christ read 
beginning at the tip of the lowest branch at the left, across the width of 
the picture towards the right and progressively upward. Below are 
scenes from the creation of man, his temptation and fall; just over 
them Moses and St. Francis on the left, St. Clare and John, the Evan- 
gelist on the right; on either side of the phoenix Ezekiel left, and Daniel 
right. Above, saints alternate with angels in glory, with Christ and 
Mary in the peak.” 

Hanging against all the swarming and shifting variety of earthly 
events Christ’s body, showing none of the distorting agony of death, 
detaches itself in a final relaxation of all effort, as if His sad task, done 
and over, the martyred spirit had lulled itself into a healing sleep. 

The lay-out of the picture is an amplified survival™ of the earlier 
Byzantinizing habit of crowding scenes of Christ’s life about Him in 
death; and yet, dissimilar as the total effect may be, the orderly repe- 
tition of the circular pattern over the surface need only be imagined 
diminished in scale and prominence to shrink to the geometrically 
patterned background of the Giottesque cross. 

It is in the miniatures again that he broke his leash. Here he 
is freer, surer, and more limpid, as if from the habit of a beloved prac- 
tice, and the medium sings under the fresh and dainty touch, and 
follows its own joyful fancy in the calligraphy of the leaves that curl 
round the medallions, and in the beautiful inscriptions of the ramifi- 
cations (Figs. 6 to 8). Unhampered by prepossessions of the monu- 
mental or the heroic, the style is lively and crisp as seldom again in the 
Florentine painting of the Trecento. The figure, sharply and com- 


5 


pendiously outlined, has the flatness of an image struck from a print- 
block, and the whole has consequently something of the character of a 
pictograph. The figures accordingly bear no real relation to the cubic 
depth but only to the surrounding patches and to the limits of the 
area, and are tied together in each scene by a cursive rhythm that moves 
from left to right. The whole ensemble by being spread evenly over the 
surface avoids all visual interruptions of the continuity of the story, 
and counterfeits the ceremonial look of a banner. 

This is not narration, the telling of a story for its chain of pro- 
gressive events or for its dramatic movement — even if in spots it has 
purely narrative passages — because the thin thread of the simple tale 
is too elaborately interwoven with theological matter that suspends and 
inflates the flow of the recital, and makes of the whole a sort of chart 
of theological propaganda. It is a kind of pictorial compendium of the 
essence of Christian teaching from the Fall at the bottom to the Re- 
demption and the Glory above; and its unity is in the orderly gradua- 
tion of the symbolism towards the climax at the top in which the whole 
bustle of events is resolved, as in the final hosanna of some churchly 
hymn. We are aware throughout of an implied text which it is in- 
tended to illustrate. It is thus a kind of program painting in which we 
do not therefore look for great moving moments or tragic depths, as 
one might expect in events wherein the fate of the world is being de- 
cided. There is no second level: the whole thing ripples on brisk, 
fresh and shallow, and its excellence lies in its maintenance of the 
limits it has put upon itself of illustration. 

Stylistically, and perhaps chronologically, between the two altar- 
pieces, is a Crucifix (Fig. 9) that now hangs over the altar in the sac- 
risty of S. Felicita in Florence assigned repeatedly, and with faltering 
conviction to the School of Giotto.” In its present condition it bears 
evidence of the power of resistance of classic technique to wanton de- 
struction and merciless restoration through the ages. 

The nude is moulded like the Christ in the Tree of Life and the 
rounded knees tapering below are identical. The shadows follow the 
cheek-bone and the hollow under it in the same way as in the Christ 
of the Academy polyptych, and the tapering arms of the two Christs 
with the unarticulated wrists and long palms terminate in the same 
curved, insubstantial fingers. The hair, the eyes, the nose, the face, 
broad above and narrowing towards the chin, derive from the same 
radical images. The feet are placed in a position known to me in no 


other Florentine instance, generally avoided, doubtless, because of the 
awkward twist it produced in the whole leg. 

If the form is external, there is a definite rhythm and considerable 
elegance in the proportions, and a more than common decisiveness in 
the drawing. 

Though its architecture follows the formula of the Giottesque 
crosses in Padua and at the Florentine churches of the Ognissanti, S. 
Marco, S. Felice, S. Croce, it is well to note that in other respects it is 
as un-Giottesque as any painting of the early Trecento in Florence 
could conceivably be. It is opposed in spirit and in aesthetic, in tragic 
intensity to the Giottesque type of crucifix, and to that passion which, 
concentrated in plastic form, are characteristic of it. The Giottesque 
feeling is abysmal and agonized, and regains its balance through vent 
(rather than establishes its existence through lack of that necessity) ; 
its effect is produced by a sharply contrasted action and reaction. Our 
crucifix has no terminal figures on the cross-bar, no audience to direct 
the focus of sentiment, and the Christ left alone spreads about Him a 
sense of silence and isolation. The complete muscular slackness is 
not intended to produce the effect of final surrender of the organiz- 
ing principle of life, but rather to tranquilize all action. There is no 
trace of pain or torment, but a truly classic moderation and harmoniz- 
ing balance of accents. Beneath the apparent extinction of active con- 
sciousness we become sensible of the deep-drawn breath of sleep. 

There remains one full-sized picture traceable to Pacino’s circle, a 
half-length Virgin (Fig. 10) in the collection of Mr. Charles Loeser in 
Florence. If there are characteristics in it that hold out stubbornly 
against an unqualified attribution, one might still reasonably ask of a 
panel painted in an age of great racial expression, whether Pacino — 
admitting his one known monumental effort to be a failure — might 
not in an exceptional case have risen to such majesty of design. One 
might, if need be, assume direct imitation. But it is harder to account 
for the sense of bulk, for the solid hands, for the flat lips and the line 
between them. 

On the other hand, one should have little difficulty in seeing the 
affinity between the Virgin’s head and that of St. Bartholomew in the 
polyptych (see Fig. 3). The features of the former, it is true, are vi- 
tally codérdinated, while those of the latter are undetermined in mean- 
ing. Nevertheless, the cut of the eyes, their setting, the iris and pupil, 
the glance, share profound analogies. The bulging forehead of the Child 
recalls the head of the St. Luke, and His ear that of the Nicholas in 


Ks 


the polyptych (see Fig. 2), while the motif of the Child holding the 
Mother’s mantle with His face turned away from Her, reappears in 
the same form in the Straus diptych (see S. P. 1). The way the border 
of the dress encircles the neck in the two Virgins is typical of Pacino, 
and the types are so intimately Pacinesque, that it would be as em- 
barrassing to refuse, as it is to ascribe, the painting to him. In minor 
particulars the analogies continue. The halos sweep in great circles 
around the heads, as in all of Pacino’s larger paintings, and are edged 
with incisions and the same tiny rosettes, as in the polyptych. The 
borders of the panel, which has been sawed off at the top, are also of the 
same character. 

If by Pacino then, the Virgin is easily his most dignified work; but 
it is precisely the exalted character of this dignity that suggests the al- 
ternative that it may be by some more nobly gifted master, still un- 
discovered, but working in Pacino’s milieu. 

Very recently (in 1924) another work by Pacino has come to light. 
That it has only just found its way from the Roman market into an 
American collection is the more gratifying, as it is a significant addi- 
tion to Pacino’s oeuvre. It is a diptych (Fig. 11) larger than the rule of 
small panels (the leaf measuring ca. 12 x 18 ins.) and of a color livelier 
than is common with Pacino. This is due to the effect of the varnish, 
which has also united the individual streaks of tempera pigment to an 
enamel-like smoothness. Subject besides, to a different kind of wear 
and renovation from other of his panels, it discloses a very fine crackle 
and an abrasion of the gold. Here and there it has lost some of the col- 
or too, as in the Virgin’s robe in the right leaf (Fig. 11), and in the 
Magdalen’s head, but the whole is in essentially healthy state. For all 
these reasons, the eye may not find it easy at first to reconcile its sur- 
face with the still fresh tempera-bloom of the Tree of Life on the one 
hand or with the marred polyptych on the other. In a confrontation 
with other works, it will be necessary to remember this, as well as the 
fact that, in a panel like the present, which lies somewhere between a 
full-sized and a miniature painting, allowances have to be made for 
variations in type, and technical differences, incidental to scale. 

The total aesthetic effect releases about the same degree of inten- 
sity as Pacino’s other paintings already discussed: the diptych neither 
sinks us deeper in spiritual immersion nor quickens the pulse to greater 
violence. ‘The savor is of the same specific variety, the types of the 
same family, and their action and movement exhibit the same eccen- 
tricities. 


The analogies between the shapes of the crosses in the diptych and 
in the Academy polyptych, between their veining; and the unusual 
crowns of thorns, are significant, even if inessential, to the fundamental 
affinities. ‘The head of the Christ in the diptych tapers towards the 
chin, past the darkly bearded jaw as that of the Christs in the Acad- 
emy. The trunk swells, and narrows at the waist similarly, the curve 
of the belly dips to the same shadow, and in the first two the thighs are 
parted by a line that runs clean up to it. These are wrapped in semi- 
transparent loin-cloths, in which the narrowly ridged and grooved folds 
are identical. The tibia in both is long, and the feet are patterned 
and posed on the same formula. 

There is a feature-for-feature agreement, even if the total likeness 
is less evident, between the Crucified in the diptych, and the corre- 
sponding figures in the Tree of Life and in the S. Felicita Cross. In 
fact its affinities to the last are closest of all (S. P. 9, 10) though the 
radical shapes of the heads in all three, of the eye, of the knobby chin, 
etc., betray the identical formal basis. 

The other heads in the diptych continue the same evidence. They 
are constructed on the same image as the heads in the polyptych, and 
like those of the Tree of Life whether round or oval, are plump- 
cheeked with a large, long-tailed, fish-shaped eye that strikes across 
into the temple. The faces are furnished with noses generally blunt, 
and sometimes showing a sagging ridge; and a small loose-rimmed 
ear. 
Thus the head of the Evangelist beside the cross in the diptych, 
though fuller of cheek, has the same mould and modulations as that of 
the Virgin in the polyptych (S. P. 2, 3) ; and the younger heads of the 
Dormition in the diptych, profess the same parenthood as those in the 
Resurrection or the Last Supper or the Tree of Life. ‘The long eyes of 
the diptych will be found in clearest agreement with those of the figures 
at the foot of the Tree of Life, as well as in those of the polyptych. 

The draperies again, as for example those of the Virgin and the St. 
John in the right leaf (Fig. 11) of the diptych recall the jagged silhou- 
ettes of the lateral personages in the polyptych, and though the con- 
trast in light and shade is sharper, on account of differences in scale 
and in the condition of the surface, their arrangement and essential 
character are the same. 

One may pursue other parallels in the medallions of the Tree of 
Life. If the rock formation in the right leaf repeats to a refinement 
the rock in the central compartment of the polyptych, the vegetation, 


9 


the tree-stem, the cinquefoil at its foot, have the same pigmental quali- 
ty with the same suggestions of the fluid vehicle with which the color 
was drenched, as the vegetation at the base of the Tree of Life or in 
the Nativity (Fig. 6) in the same panel. In fact the cinquefoil recurs 
in the Nativity in a simplified form, only it is set down compendiously 
in hasty strokes that neglect the leaf-shape. 

Though execution is inherent in total shape, it will be well to point 
to its separate similarity in the diptych to the execution in the Tree of 
Life. Both show the same streaking-on of the light at the top of the 
cheek, the ridge of the nose, the jaw and chin, and the same relation in 
value to the darker parts around it. Only the larger scale of the diptych 
involves a somewhat heavier brush stroke and a less cursive line. 

From the existence of a number of small pictures one would be 
tempted to conclude that Pacino’s activity as a panel miniaturist did 
not end with the Tree of Life, and that like Bernardo Daddi and 
Jacopo del Casentino he turned out scores of portable paintings exe- 
cuted with the aid of a shop of assistants. One of these**is among the 
treasure of pictures Herbert Horne left to the city of Florence (Fig. 
12). Its painting falls into the period of the Tree of Life. The style 
and the type of the Horne picture may be found passim in this panel, 
but the pattern and the Virgin’s fashion of wearing her mantle, the 
hatching and folds of the drapery, the hands, the mode of rounding the 
forms, the streak of light down the ridges of the nose, the lips — all will 
be found repeated in the small medallion representing the Adoration 
(Fig. 8). 

The picture, which has suffered slightly from a darkening influence 
of the varnish, was commissioned by a patron eager to recommend 
himself to the Virgin’s intimate sympathies, and made Pacino see to it 
that she was more than commonly liberal of sentiment. The master’s 
fondness for a strong, blood scarlet appears in the background. The 
scrollwork tooled largely in the fashion of the time adds a magnificence 
to the lordly halos. 

Signs of the same personality — manifesting itself in varying de- 
grees but in a similar phase of Pacino’s artistic activity — occur in two 
small triptychs, in all that is known to me of what must have been a 
large number of similar panels, produced for a humble clientéle with 
the collaboration of assistants. Where Pacino’s hand seems to be pres- 
ent, long habit or else the admixture of inferior aid has relaxed the 
execution. 

Though rubbed and sleeked to be made presentable to the modern 


fe) 


buyer, it is still possible to see that the one formerly in the Florentine 
market (lig. 13) is less evolved in style than, though close in general 
physiognomy to, the Tree of Life. In some of the medallions of this 
painting the eyes of the heads facing outward maintain a diagrammatic 
symmetry, and the noses are rendered by a vertical stroke and two dots 
symmetrically placed on either side at its base. The head of our Virgin 
follows the same facial formula. The hands, if a trifle different, have 
the same air of mild ineffectuality, and the straw fingers are similarly 
attached. The dilated eyes of the figures in the wings of our triptych, 
the sagging ridge of the pinched noses, appear conspicuously in the 
Tree of Life. In the light of these stylistic affinities the iconographic 
analogies between the Flagellation, the Entombement, the Crucifix- 
ion of the triptych, and the same scenes in the medallions; the same 
dryness, the same strained and awkward expression in both paintings, 
persuade one if not of common authorship, at least of a common shop. 

In the figures of the triptych of the Museo Bandini at Fiesole (Fig. 
14) which are clumsier, and the faces of which are heavier, we shall find 
the same short hand, the same stereotype in the drawing. The line 
sings the same melody (though the hand is unsteadier and has a less 
even touch) and its graphological character — particularly in the case 
of the border of the Virgin’s mantle — is the same as in the Tree of 
Life. The compositional plan of the central portion is a relaxation of 
the formula of the corresponding section in the other triptych. The 
hands repeat those of the Horne panel, and the Magdalen’s are folded 
like those in the upper tiers of the Tree of Life. 

But this testimony is complicated by disparities that draw it close 
to the S. Cecilia Master. 

In the study on Pacino already alluded to,” I recorded the feeling 
that Pacino had a miniature habit of mind and brush. It has since 
become a certainty, from works I have been able to identify in the in- 
terval, that his shop devoted itself busily to the running illumination 
of texts written on parchment or vellum. More than that, their num- 
ber compared to the relative scarcity of Florentine miniatures of this 
early period, raises the likelihood that book-illumination centered in 
Pacino’s shop, which was among the most important of its kind in the 
third and fourth decades of the Trecento in Florence. Not far beyond 
its limits lies the activity of a group to which Bernardo Daddi be- 
longed, and of which the Laurentian manuscript Il Biadaiolo™ is the 
principal surviving book-illumination. 


II 


An extended work of this kind and one of the most important of 
Pacino’s shop rests in the J. Pierpont Morgan Library: A Life of Christ 
(with occasional scenes from lives of other saints) told in 38 full page 
illuminations (Fig. 15, 16), each leaf measuring 954 x 67% inches, 
without text or comment or title.” 

The Pacinesque character of the entire series is clear (S. P. 4, 7, 8, 
11). In fact, so close is its radical type to that of the Straus diptych, 
that it must have been executed at about the same time. The round 
faces, the sleek shining convexity of cheek and of jowl, the long-tailed 
eyes cutting clear across the wide cheek into the temples, the hair (that 
of the adolescents is clipped straight above the foreheads and exposes a 
small ear), the dainty-fingered hands, the inarticulate wrists, the san- 
dals bound with slender thongs, the rocks, the action, all are repeated 
here. In the Christ in the House of Emmaus in the Morgan Life of 
Christ (to take a convenient instance), the young St. John has the 
head and the left hand of the St. John in the nght leaf of the diptych. 
The Virgins again in the Illuminations of the Miracle of the Wine and 
Water and of the Presentation, of the Adoration, of the Nativity, 
(Fig. 16) and of the Annunciation, variously profess the type of Our 
Lady Enthroned in the diptych. The high lights in the diptych touch 
the same projections of the face as throughout in the illuminations, 
and the modelling shapes them to the same roundness with a plump- 
ness of cheek, a diminutive hand, foot and ear, a mildness of temper 
to be found everywhere in the illuminations. 

Though the technique in the Tree of Life is more summary, the 
similar correspondencies to those just instanced appear between the 
illuminations and the medallions of this panel (S. P. 4, 6, 12, 11, 15). 
It is of course the similar state of the Morgan Illuminations and of 
the Tree of Life that renders them comparable in point of execution, 
which for other reasons as well approximates the two works. The line 
is looser and the streaking of the brush, though not as free, as in the 
Tree of Life, manifests differences due only or chiefly to the medium. 
Indentity of hands in the Illuminations and medallions will appear 
most obvious in those of the two series that represent the same themes, 
as for example in the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Crucifixion, 
the Kiss of Judas, and so on. 

The inequality of these illuminations both in style and excellence 
may be explained from what we know of the tendency in Trecento 
shops to mix hands. The limits of this inequality, however, lie well 
within the bounds of Pacino’s style, so that the only question admis- 


12 


sible about their authorship is the extent of Pacino’s personal share in 
their execution. It is more than likely that this was twofold. From 
the enumerated analogies to other works — analogies chiefly of plan, 
pattern, type and general shape — there can be no doubt that Pacino 
himself designed them. The fact however that those superior in exe- 
cution are also the closest to his other works, would urge his share 
in the actual painting. This superiority in similarity appears chiefly 
in the Visitation (Fig. 15), the Annunciation, the Adoration, the Bap- 
tism, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Way to Calvary, the Pieta, and the 
Descent of the Holy Ghost. 

Pacino’s understanding of structure was rather conventional than 
organic: his form reaches us rather as fact than as experience. Never- 
theless, his understanding of it is adequate for his limited ends; it 
justifies itself within its own context. That understanding inheres in 
the scenes just named in a greater measure than in the remaining ones. 
The line is more graceful and calligraphic, and the expression of both 
body and face is more unified and convincing. But in the other scenes 
the action has a certain strain and flatness; it has the unrehearsed air 
of a play prematurely presented, as if the executant, guided by the 
master’s drawing, followed it without catching the impulse that gave 
it expression. The result is that while the design often suggests a cer- 
tain dignity, or piety, the inferior hand betrays itself in a wavering or 
scamping outwardness of interpretation of the latent original, in the 
diagrammatic faces, in the ill-adjusted movements, and in the awk- 
ward statement. An odd, unaccustomed expression surprises the fea- 
tures. They smirk or simper or twitch out of turn and out of place 
and thus ruffle the intended effect. This is true of such scenes as the 
Scoffing, Christ in the House of Emmaus, Christ Mounting the Cross, 
and the Washing of the Feet of the Disciples. 

Taken as a whole, the Morgan Vita Christi maintains a more con- 
sistently measured pace, a graver rhythm, a greater dignity, than any 
other of Pacino’s works. The action has neither any of the eager im- 
pulsiveness of the medallions in the Tree of Life, nor again the weak- 
nesses of the polyptych. The series professes a more settled mastery 
and maturity, and would, accordingly, seem to be one of his later works. 

The similar technique and types of an Illuminated Choral in the 
Boston Museum of Fine Arts joins this work as well to Pacino’s circle. 
The individual leaves which have been cut down now measure 939 by 
13 inches, and contain several initials adorned with figure composi- 
tions. Although they were executed by a different hand (or hands) 


13 


from the Morgan series, nevertheless they all, but chiefly the Descent 
of the Holy Spirit, betray peculiarities of shape, folds, hands, the specu- 
lation of the eye, already found to be habitual with Pacino. The loose, 
fluid execution exactly repeats the technique of the Morgan illumina- 
tions. 

Most impressive in design of all his illuminations is a full-page 
miniature representing the Ascension (Fig. 17) with two figures of 
donors in a medallion below, in the collection of Mr. Frank Smith of 
Worcester, Mass. This was doubtless the frontispiece of an antiphonal. 

There is a studied balance in the action, a more conscious exalta- 
tion, and a settled placidity with none of the usual Florentine tension. 
The figures are relaxed in structure and in movement in a sort of rapt 
absorption. The restlessness of the Tree of Life is entirely gone from 
ite 

There is a smoothness in the execution, and a continuity of line that 
obey a temperament more tranquil than that of Pacino. But for the 
general shapes, the types differ from those usual in his works in the 
somewhat smaller iris, the narrower eye with dark rims round it, the 
uncommonly small hand, an exaggeration of the neck-length and its 
movement, and in the more meticulous graduation of the shadow with 
an omission of accents. 

If Pacino’s fundamental shapes and Pacino’s design abide within 
these disguises, the hand is certainly not his, the pedantic execution 
resulting from a servile adherence to the master’s plan. Nevertheless 
the leaf has the virtue of consistently pursuing a single effect. This 
effect is the poetic expression of some able craftsman, whose tempera- 
mental affinities are far away in the full Umbrian Renaissance. In 
both, the concentration of formal and dramatic suggestions is forfeited 
for a more extended harmony of sustained linear rhythms. Life be- 
comes immobilized, the world wider and more tranquil, and its inhabi- 
tants, free of the law of gravitation, are absorbed mind and body, in an 
eternal vision. 

As these essays go to press, three other works of illumination from 
the shop of Pacino fall under my notice. ‘The more extended and im- 
portant one is a bible mentioned by Paolo d’Ancona (in La Miniature 
Italienne Du Xe Au XVIe Siecle, Ed. G. van Oest, Paris, 1925, 34, pls. 
XXX-XXI) as in the Library of Prince Trivulzio,” and described as a 
work of a Florentine miniaturist “impressioné par |’école de Sienne;” 
the work, d’Ancona continues to say “se recommande par |’exuberance 
de sa decoration.” Of the two leaves reproduced by this author, plate 


14 


XX XJ shows a representation of the Tree of Life similar to Pacino’s 
panel in the Florentine Academy, only that in the illumination, the 
small medallions, twenty-four in number, contain busts of saints and 
prophets. A twenty-fifth, intended probably for God, the Father, is 
unframed and breaks the all-over symmetry on the left at the top. 

All the features that have persisted through Pacino’s works reviewed 
up to this point, recur here, from the types, the hands, the Crucified, to 
the brush-stroke and the modelling. Only a certain loss of character 
in the total would make it necessary to assume shop-assistance in the 
execution. 

A parchment sheet, framed and hanging at the Fitzwilliam Mu- 
seum, Cambridge, England, was originally probably the frontispiece 
of a choral. In the body of it are two representations one above the 
other, the upper the Resurrection, the lower the Three Maries at the 
Tomb. Below, left and right, are two diminutive donors. Running 
along the left side of the page and along the bottom are a series of 
medallions (interrupted half-way in each course by a mandorla) con- 
taining small scenes instancing mainly Christ’s miraculous appear- 
ances after death. 

The Christ of the Resurrection is most closely paralleled in the 
Smith Ascension: the figure, posture, head, hands, draping being nearly 
identical. The rocks and foliage approximate those in the Morgan 
Vita Christi. The head of the angel seated on the tomb is given a spec- 
tral purple transparency as in the Morgan I]luminations. 

Finally a Martyrdom and Assumption of St. Lawrence belonging 
to Marczell von Nemes, in Munich, joins the productions of Pacino’s 
shop by affinities particularly close to the Smith and Fitzwilliam 
sheets. 

Now, if the works thus assembled are harmonious among them- 
selves and constant to a single personality, what are its stylistic and 
aesthetic determinants? By an aggregate of what individual signs in 
these works shall Pacino be known? Of the types that appear predom- 
inantly, the round-headed — chiefly in young personages (S. P. 2, 12) 
—is more common than the long-headed, and shows a fleshy mask 
(S. P. 1, 2, 12) that covers a mould wide at the cheek, which often 
tapers toward the chin (S. P. 9, 10, 12, 14). His grey-beards are square- 
jawed (S. P. 6, 7, 11). Where the young men are bearded, the hair 
fringes the face (S. P. 9, 10, 14). Heads with high bulging foreheads 
vary and extend his range (S. P. 8,11). The nose is straight and long, 
or blunt and curved outward. The lips are soft, full and clean-edged. 


15 


The hand has either the helpless appearance of an inflated glove (see 
Figs. 2, 3) or of being cut out of cardboard (see Figs.6,7, 15). His 
tendency is to construct summarily, to articulate loosely, and generally 
there is no line of junction given between hand and forearm: in his 
nudes — more especially — there is no articulation of the wrist. Long 
shallow folds run in large curves over draperies that hang loosely on an 
ignored structure. His tooling is uncommonly fine, barely visible: to 
vary and enrich the gold surface it produces a chatoiement upon it. 
The ornamental details, lozenges, stars, circles, and quatrefoils, are his 
inheritance of the geometric taste of the thirteenth century. 

As Pacino seeks above everything else the fluidity of narration (and 
preéminently in his miniatures), he reduces the form, when required, 
to a medium fluid like notes in music or words in a poem. He does not 
stop, like other miniaturists of his time, to smoothly round out his 
forms, because rotundity has plastic intimations, and plasticity tends 
to hold up the flow of the story. His line and modelling accordingly, 
are aS summary as is consistent with their primary function of com- 
municating something other than themselves. To this end the figure 
bears no real relation to the cubic space, but leaves a web of patterns 
over the face of the panel. It is neither architectonic nor monumental ; 
and it thinks and feels on a small scale. The pantomime is mild, timid, 
without vehemence or exaltation, and there is an air of unsuspecting 
acceptance of their fate about his people. 

His larger figures are self-effacing: they betray the artist’s uneasi- 
ness in their company on account of their monumental suggestions. 
The line wanders languidly over the edges, and contents itself with a 
generic rendering of a theme to which he brings neither a high degree 
of energy nor conviction. 

But in the miniature scenes he is in his own element. He can be 
heroic on a small scale, as for example in some of the Morgan Illumi- 
nations, or in parts of the Tree of Life; or again unconcernedly and 
prosaically narrative, as in some of the medallions, where the figures 
absorbed like children in their play, dart about with odd jerky move- 
ments and with their eyes popping out of their eager, elfish heads. 

From all that has been said, it will be clear that Pacino was not a 
Giottesque in the conventional sense. ‘This designation, which several 
of Pacino’s panels still carry, can be due only to the wide margin of 
safety there is in assuming any Florentine master of the early four- 
teenth century subject to an influence so powerful. But the imputa- 
tion of such influence in Pacino is only relatively just, because it holds 


16 


only of isolated and incidental aspects of his painting. Pacino it is true 
almost certainly began with Giotto. He may have worked with him at 
an early formative stage, if we are to judge from certain gestures, the 
facial diagram, even the type. These features, however, render it al- 
most as likely that his early training was involved in Roman painting, 
possibly in Cavallini’s, who himself painted in Florence. Nevertheless, 
neither the Roman nor the Giottesque influences seem to have been 
decisive in his formation. They went no farther than to mould his vo- 
cabulary. His art has a different tendency and belongs to a different 
order of artistic expression. One has only to compare Pacino’s works, 
large and small, with those of Giotto’s close followers — Taddeo Gad- 
di’s, Maso’s, or Orcagna’s — to see how consistently divergent the 
architectural solid (which is the radical unit of Giottesque composition) 
and Pacino’s pictorial writing really are. And his technique, his man- 
ual habits, his attitude towards his medium, are likewise totally differ- 
ent from Giotto’s.” It is a technique accommodated, as far as one can 
judge, from his earliest period to another kind of imagery, which moves 
with the rhythm of life, temperamentally discrepant from the Giot- 
tesque vision of a world outlasting humanity and exceeding its powers. 
Such a mode of feeling naturally leaned to narrative (that is, the evolv- 
ing rather than the eternal) and to the smaller scale (the human 
rather than the heroic) ; and constitutes a tendency imbedded in Flor- 
entine art, and continuous through its evolution. This tendency logi- 
cally looks for the incidental rather than the unchanging in form, for 
the qualitative rather than the substantive. It is fanciful, lyrical and 
inventive. It includes painters the better part of whose work, whether 
so in name or not, has the character of illumination, and it is no acci- 
dent that most of what they have left is a sort of book-illustration on 
panel. 

They first loom out of a still shadowy tradition with the so-called 
Master of the Saint Cecily Altarpiece, joined by Pacino and a cluster 
of nameless satellites; followed close by Bernardo Daddi, Jacapo del 
Casentino, and the I! Biadaiuolo illuminator. And as Giotto is the in- 
spiration and fountain head of the monumental tendency, so the Saint 
Cecily Master seems to be the earliest to have found the formula for 
the group just mentioned. 

This master elaborated, pulled about (identified more recently with 
Buffalmacco) is, as recent criticism has left him,” a pluralistic per- 
sonality, the nucleus of which, in spite of the violence done him, is 
definite and coherent enough. He is probably a shade older than Pa- 


17 


cino, of a firmer fibre and greater maturity of imagination. Specific 
signs of his influence appear, as must be expected but sparingly in the 
small remains of Pacino’s painting; but the eye that has learnt to look 
for derivations, will find it in the gait of Pacino’s line, and in his way 
of stabilizing the design, in the first and in the last glance at his works. 

The air of the diminutive frontal figures symmetrically placed on 
either side of the throne in the Straus diptych and small triptychs al- 
ready discussed, suggests their having come from such a picture as the 
altarpiece by the S. Cecilia Master at S. Margherita a Montici. The 
female saint left of the throne; and the type, and silhouette of the St. 
Margaret, who stands between vertical courses of stories of her martyr- 
dom in another picture in the same church, owe their origin to the 
formula that reappears in the medallion of the Tree of Life showing 
the Coronation and in the Glory of Saints above. The square sharp- 
cornered architecture of the last named panel, its light and dark, find 
nowhere else so close a parallel as in the St. Margaret panel just men- 
tioned, and after that in the S. Cecilia altarpiece in the Uffizi. The 
throne of the little Virgin by Pacino in the Horne collection is like that 
of a small Virgin at Budapest by the S. Cecilia Master, and like one by 
another of his followers in the conventual chapel of S. Maria Madda- 
lena in Pian di Mugnone. The same architectural motives and per- 
spective occur so frequently in the works of the S. Cecilia Master that 
one must conclude this type of throne had become a shop-convention. 

In less noticeable details, such, for example, as the treatment of the 
gold ground, one will find unexpected analogies. So the lozenged pat- 
tern of the uppermost portion of the Tree of Life seems imitated from 
the ground of the S. Cecilia Master’s Uffizi altarpiece; it is pointed with 
similar dots, and shows the same conventionalized leaves against the 
same cross-hatching. A strong scarlet note is common to both, and 
Pacino’s preference for pale green and yellow is anticipated in the 
works of the Cecilia Master. 

But no detail of resemblance goes so far towards establishing the 
hypothesis of Pacino’s derivation, as the forward bird-like thrust of the 
neck and the way it bears its head in the medallions of the Tree of 
Life, the construction of the round heads (in the young men especial- 
ly), the manner of setting light on the faces, and its value in the con- 
text; the small signorial hands with the slim brittle fingers, their mode 
of touching objects; the placing of the eyes — where narrow eyes oc- 
cur — and all the nuance of formation about them. The draperies 


18 


with sharply wrinkled ridged folds were woven by the same looms, and 
the surface shows streaks of the same brush. 

Now and then the suspicion of Sienese influence passes over certain 
of Pacino’s works — of which the rounded knees and narrow hips of 
his nude Christs, some of their heads, and here and there the general 
appearance of a figure, are strongly confirming. For the rest Pacino 
is true to his city’s artistic past, though he stands always on the side 
opposed to Giotto’s. 


19 


to 


Io. 


II. 


NOTES 


. Many of the conclusions reached in this essay I first published in Arr rv America, December, 


1922, 3-27. 


. To take the most sinning examples, Venturi, V, 506, guardedly assumes the possibility that Pacino 


painted the lateral figures in the polyptych signed with Giotto’s name in the Pinacoteca at Bologna 
—a work of direct Giottesque derivation; he is followed by Van Marle, III, 240-250, who surpasses 
himself in his attributions to Pacino, the strongest refutation of which is in his own illustrations; 
and Suida in the Prussian Jahrbuch for 1905, 109, followed by the Cicerone (last German edition) 
attributes to him a Sienese Virgin in the Ex-Refectory of S. Croce in Florence, restored with jus- 
tice by F. Mason Perkins to the Maestro del Codice di S. Giorgio (Rassegna d’arte, 1918, 107, 
II0-I12). 


. He seems unknown to Ghiberti, Antonio Billi, Albertini and Vasari. 


. To Thode’s first timid linking of the Tree of Life to the signed polyptych, both in the Florentine 


Academy (see his Franz von Assisi, Berlin, 1885), Suida (Prussian Jahrbuch for 1905, 108) added 
— apart from the Virgin mentioned in note 2 — two Saints, in Monatshefte fiir Kunstwissenshaft, 
VII, 3, refused to Pacino by Borenius (Pictures by the Old Masters in the Library of Christ 
Church, Oxford, 1916, 24, 25, numbered 16 and 17). 


. Nuovi Documenti, Florence before 1888, 17. Under the date 1303 Pacino dissolves partnership 


with a certain Tambo di Serraglio, and is here spoken of as “artifex in arte pictorum.” His name 
appears a second time in the register of the Guild of the Medici e Speziali in the volume that’ 
runs from 1320 to 1353. 


. The repeated assumption that Pacino was a pure Giottesque is the too common effort of scattered 


and fragmentary knowledge to become conclusive. His temperament and his talents, as will be 
seen, committed him to a different tradition and a different tendency. 


. Reproduced in Venturi, V, 502, and in Van Marle, III, 243. 
. The inscription under the central compartment reads: SYMON RBTER S FLOR FEC PIGI 


H OP A PACINO BONAGUIDE ANO DNI MCCCX. Thode, the first to read it (Franz von 
Assisi, Berlin, 1885, 503, note 3) believes he can see vestiges of two X’s following the legible 
date, leaving it 1330. Thode, who perceived the influence of Giotto (a very different Giotto from 
ours!) in the drawing of this picture, did all he could to read the date as late as possible. 
Milanesi before 1888 (Nuovi Documenti 17) reads MCCCX. Suida (Prussian Jahrbuch, 1905, 
108) would substantiate his reading of the date as MCCCX on the basis of equal lengths of space 
before and following the inscription, but as these are variable under the lateral compartments, one 
may reject both his argument and his conclusion. Today the date seems so far to have been 
respected by the cleaner as to show the upper left tip of the diagonal bar of what must needs 
once have been either a V or an X, following the first X; making it probable, on the evidencer 
before our eyes, that the earliest possible original date was MCCCXV. The other limit would be 
furnished by Thode’s reading. 


. See the Crucifixion in the polyptych in the chapel of St. George in S. Chiara, Assisi (Sirén, plate 


102); and the same subject in a small triptych in the Horne Collection (Sirén, plate 104); also 
the Crucifixion at the Florentine Academy painted under the influence of Daddi. 


Strongly reminiscent of the S. Cecilia Master. Reproductions of this painter’s works will be 
found in the first part of vol. II, in Sirén, pls. 10-13 inclusive. 


Reproduced in Venturi, V, 507, and Van Marle, III, 248. 


. It is a faithful illustration of Bonaventura’s Lignum Vitae, and its only instance of panel; the 


other two Italian versions of this subject are one by 'T. Gaddi in the Ex-Refectory, S. Croce, 


20 


13. 
14. 


15. 


16. 


17. 
18. 


19. 


20. 


21. 


22. 


Florence; the other, anonymous, and derived from it, in the Chapter Hall of S. Francesco, Pistoia. 
See Thode, Franz von Assisi, 502-507. 


The effaced saint in the rock from which the cross rises is probably S. Bonaventura. 


The presence of isolated archaisms (such as striated and line-edged draperies, the Byzantine 
feature of hands raised to the height of the bosom and turned outward symmetrically) and of 
certain representations no longer then in fashion (such as the first, in which God the Father holds 
the Infant); the Dugento formulas for the Annunciation, the Last Supper to take the more 
common scenes, tempt one to assume an earlier model for this panel and possibly even some 
series of miniatures. 


Thus Cicerone (last German ed.), Maud Cruttwell, Florentine Churches, London, Dent, 1908, 127. 
Van Marle, III, 248-249, believes he sees a relation between this Crucifix and the Tree of Life, 
both of which he attributes to a Predecessor of Pacino di Bonaguida. 


In the Catalogo Illustrato della Fondazione Horne (Firenze, 1921, 34, no. 91) it is attributed to 
the Scuola di Giotto. Its size is m. .24x.26. Van Marle, III, 249, recognizes its identity of style 
with the Tree of Life but attributes it to a Predecessor of Pacino. 


See note 1. 


See Paolo d’Ancona, La Miniatura Fiorentina, Florence, 1914, and La Miniature Italienne, etc. 
Paris, 1925, pl. XX XIII. 


Mr. Sidney Cockerell has very kindly pointed out to me that the Morgan Vita Christi was formerly 
in the Henry Yates Thompson Collection, and that some of its pages are reproduced in Illustrations 
from One Hundred Manuscripts in the Library of Henry Yates Thompson, pl. V-XV. I notice 
that the attribution I some years ago bestowed upon these illuminations has since been adopted 
by Prof. Morey in The Arts for 1925. 


Cod. 2139, fol. 435. 


Van Marle, III, 250, writing since the publication of this view in 1922, still regards Pacino as a 
Giottesque, an error that leads him to attribute to this master four Saints belonging to Mr. 
Mori, Paris. (See Van Marle, V, 468). 


The reconstruction of this master begins with Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 
London, 1901, and is continued by Suida, Jahrbuch der Koniglichen Preussischen Kunstsammlun- 
gen, 1905, II, 89 et seq., who is also the first to suggest him as Pacino’s teacher. Since this pub- 
lication, Venturi (V, 290), has tried to identify him with Buffalmacco; and Sirén (Burlington 
Magazine; 1920, 4-11; 1924, 272) to substantiate this identification lamely on the basis of the 
effaced frescoes at the Badia a Settimo ascribed to Buffalmaco by Ghiberti. The St. Cecily 
Master has, like so many incompletely known painters been disfigured by over-attribution, and 
chiefly in the last of the Burlington Magazine articles by Osvald Sirén; and by Van Marle, III, 
274-294. Under the name of this master I should include only the following works: 

Florence, Uffizi, Altarpiece, no. 449. 

Montici (near Florence), S. Margherita, St. Margaret and Scenes from her Life. 

Montici, S. Margherita, Altarpiece. 

Budapest, Museum, Small Madonna Saints, Angels and Donors, no. 41. 

Florence, S. Simone, St. Peter. 

Assisi, Upper Church of St. Francis, Nos. 1, 26-28, of the Frescoes of the Life of St. Francis. 
Florence, S. Giorgio, Madonna and Two Angels. 


ao nnd 
aad < 
ee 

j — 

A abe 

> a 

i 

© 

7 y 

4 

wom 

y 


oo~I 


Ankh wD 


DerTAaILs FROM THE Works oF Pacino v1 BonacuipA 


New York, Mr. Jesse I. Straus, Diptych. 
New York, Mr. Jesse I. Straus, Diptych 
Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polvptych. 
Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. 


New York, Mr. Jesse I. Straus, Diptych. 


Florence, S. Felicita, Crucifix. 


New York, The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, Vita Christi. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. 
Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. 
Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. 


New York, The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, Vita Christi. 


nt 


Fic. 2. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: Str. Nicnotas, DETAIL FROM THE PoLyptTycH Fic. 3. Pacino pvt Bonacuma: Sr. BarrHoLomMew, 
DETAIL FROM THE PoLypTycH 


Icademy, Florence 


Academy, Florence 


Fic. 4. Pacino pt Bonacuma: Derait FROM THE TREE OF LIFE 


Academy, Florence 


Fic. 6. Pacino v1 Bonacutpa: Fic. 7. Pacino pit Bonacuipa: 
Yue Nativiry FROM THE TREE oF LIFE ‘Tue CRUCIFIXION FROM THE TREE OF LIFE 


Academy, Florence Academy, Florence 


Fic. 5. Pacino pt Bonacurpa: Fic: 8. Pacino p1 BonaAcuipA: 


Propnet Apove Str. NICHOLAS IN THE PoLyprycH Tue AporATION FROM THE TREE OF LIFE 


Academy, Florence Academy, Florence 


ie essanneseternense: ie mn Nene 


eileen «553 


rd 
; a 
4 
g 
£ 
: 


Dee ase aad 


Fic. 10. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: Maponna AND CHILD 


Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence 


THE PoLyprycH 


N 


N I 


"RUCIFIXIO 


Derait or THE C 


o p1 BonacuipA: 


Pacin 


1 


IG, 


+ 
Ht 


I 


Florence 


Academy, 


MALL TRIPTYCH 


iw 


Suop oF Pacino pi Bonacuipa: 


14; 


Fic. 


Florentine Market 


. 
; 
* 
hi 
I 


Fic. 9. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: Crucirix Fic. 12. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: 


St. Felicita, Florence Maponna, SS, Francis ann LAWRENCE 


The Horne Foundation, Florence 


. 
’ 
J i 
‘ I 4 
t 
r 7 ° 
; 
3 ~ 
_ ae 
, ‘ 
_ es 
+ 
’ 
- 
* 
5 
\ ‘ 
; 
‘ 
} 
; 
if 
‘ 


“TUIp Ung OAsn fy 
- VaINOVNOG Id ONIDVd AO 


aj0s ly 


‘VI “Old 


NAVIL]\ 


TIVNS 


HOALdIU I 


Fic. 15. Pacino pt Bonacuipa (AssisTED): LEAF FROM THE LiFe oF CurisT Fic. 16. Pacino pr Bonacuwa (AssisTED): LEAF FROM THE LiFE oF CHRIST 
The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 


NATED LEAF 


AN ILLUMI 


DETAIL OF 


sUIDA: 


NAG 


ER OF Pacino pi Bo 


FoL_ow 


7 


I 


Fic 


Mass. 


, 


Smith, Worcester 


Frank C. 


Mr. 


Collection of 


NN 


te 


2 
= 
¥ 


he OE NNN NEAL ALO DALE 


S. MinIATo AND 


ENTINO: 


AS 


g. JAcopro DEL C 


Eres 


s LiFe 


NES FROM HI 


ScE 


Church of S. 


Miniato, Florence 


JACOPO DEL CASENTINO' 


9 Daas is as much truth in an attribution nowadays, as there is 
credulity in an innocent public. And the blame is about equal on 
both sides. The more clouded — or wanton, as the case may be — 
opinion is, the more kindly people seem to take to its changing “camels 
and weasels.” If on the other hand they have met with repeated disap- 
pointment — which in the end they are bound to do — they sink into 
a despairing or slighting suspicion of the whole business. But it is 
easier on the whole to believe, and belief helps besides, to make the 
game by so much the merrier. And this in spite of the fact that the 
mischief done is sure to incommode serious effort, which, apart from 
the indifference it meets with, even within its own circle, has to endure 
the rankling hostility of valuable interests. The pressure of these has, 
in fact, tended to reduce even that paragon of incorruptibility, the stu- 
dent, to the prevailing cynicism, that will look on with calm to see 
others — and, too often, himself — tag works of art with labels best 
serving the unseemliest of private ends. An attribution consequently, 
which, in the exalted pursuits of scholarship, has its own far-reaching 
significance, is in this way bared of all but its market-value. 

Thus it happens that, because Jacopo’s name has the sanction of a 
classical reputation, while his work has remained obscure, it has been 
found easy and profitable to attach it to a number of pictures with only 
a certain vagueness of sentiment and style in common. The result of 
such a practice is clear: it leaves us in this, as in many other instances, 
with a many-headed hydra, whose output has become as heterogeneous 
as it was before 1909 when Herbert Horne’ first reduced it to two au- 
thentic works (Figs. 1, 2). 

Horne preferred to err on the side of prudence. Profiting by the 
example of earlier incoherent reconstructions of this master, rather 
than trust a wayward judgment, the archivist’s conscience has even 
gone so far as to reject a number of panels, which an automatic deduc- 
tion from these two paintings urges irresistibly upon us. 

With such safe beginnings, it is less astonishing to find Vasari’ shuf- 
fling Jacopo with his contemporaries, or Cavalcaselle interchanging 
him with Giovanni dal Ponte, than to find him confused more recently* 


23 


with the following of Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi and even with a 
painter of an older generation, thought to be Buffalmacco.’ 

In the midst of these embarrassing disagreements therefore, an in- 
tegration of Jacopo must repose on the two radical works alluded to: 
his only autographed picture belonging to Don Guido Cagnola in 
Milan (Fig. 1), and another (Fig. 2), assigned to him by an old and 
persistent tradition, now in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte 
della lana, in Florence,’ showing sure signs of the same hand. 

Though an integration had as yet been in no sense attempted, Os- 
vald Sirén (in Giotto and Some of his Followers, Harvard University 
Press, 1917, 188-192, pls. 169-171) has linked to Horne’s original two, 
three other panels which suggest fresh tendencies, even if they do not 
touch his limits. To these I have here added a number, bringing the 
total up to over a score, in which unhappily none bears a date, and only 
one may be placed with relative precision in a chronological alignment. 

There is very little available evidence outside the pictures. The 
period of his activity alone may be surmised, and from the following 
information. In the first edition of his Lives, Vasari affirms that 
Jacopo was buried at Prato Vecchio at 65 in 1358. The doubtful re- 
liability of this statement is cancelled by data gathered by Horne, who 
in the Rivista d’arte (for 1909, 100, 101) conjectures on likely ground 
that the year MCCCIL (1349) entered against Jacopo’s name in the 
Statute-book of the Confraternity of Painters, is the year of his death. 
The same article cites a document recording a commission to Jacopo 
in 1347; but with the year 1354 all record of him in the Libro dell’Es- 
timo ceases. These dates then supported by that of 1339,’ under which 
Jacopo is mentioned as Consigliere of the above confraternity, lead 
one by a series of innocent inferences to confine Jacopo’s earliest ac- 
tivity to ca. 1320. | 

With such spare data, Jacopo’s works have had to be ordered on the 
basis of fugitive evidence in the pictures themselves. And even there, 
while it was necessary to assume breaches in the original series, it has 
been impossible to localize them, much less to estimate their length. 
What has survived could, accordingly, be marshalled only by fairly 
arbitrary parti-pris, to suggest a continuity of style rather than a claim 
to strictness in individual succession. 


Florence, Mr. Chas. Loeser. Dormition of the Virgin. (Fig. 3). 


Attributed with qualifications by Sirén to Jacopo (I, 191, 192). 
Good state. Dimensions m. .85 x .615. The broad border of tooled 


24 


ornament running in the gold at the left follows the vertical part of the 
frame, seeming to continue from another composition formerly above 
it, Mr. Loeser’s picture is probably one of a series of scenes from the 
life of the Blessed Virgin, which stood on either side of Her enthroned 
figure: a mode of representation fashionable until the last part of the 
Dugento, and surviving as late as this in at least one other panel by 
Jacopo, the S. Miniato altarpiece. 

The long bony structure of the Christ’s head (S.P. 2); the pale iris, 
the light seeking the edge of the long nose and the projection around 
the eye, its expression; the yielding chin, the type; will be found in the 
Virgin of the small Cagnola triptych; and the sharply drawn folds of 
the child in Mr. Loeser’s panel, recur in the loincloth of the Crucified 
in the triptych. The wavy locks and beards of the apostles simulate 
those of John, the Evangelist in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte 
della Lana. 

The broad border tooled with the Dugento motive of the scroll, and 
the tooled halos, the dingy severity of the figures, put this nearer the 
beginning of the century than any of his other works. A composition 
uncommon in, and unsuited to, upright compartments, it is the only 
extant one among Jacopo’s works in which he seems to imitate a defi- 
nite work of Giotto. It is a contraction of Giotto’s Dormition in the 
Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin; but the fact that the centre of the 
composition is copied figure for figure would not be enough to sub- 
stantiate his derivation from Giotto, which is the most ancient view. 
One might more reasonably surmise from the types a Giottesque influ- 
ence transmitted by Taddeo Gaddi.* 

Is it possible that this picture marks Jacopo’s earliest encounter with 
Giottesque painting? In any case the Giottesque traces are transitory 
and overlay fundamental forms which derive from another source. 


Florence, Collection of Mr. Chas. Loeser. Annunciation. 


Though of proportions and size (m. .78 x .59) approximating those of 
Mr. Loeser’s Dormition, and though it deals with the same saint and 
has similar tooled halos it does not seem to be of the same series. But 
not being as well preserved as the Dormition no stylistic confrontation 
could be conclusive for this view. 

The long cheeked faces approximate those in the St. Bartholomew 
altarpiece and in the large tabernacle, and seem, like the Dormition, 
to belong to his specifically Florentine moment. 

To make the limits of a symmetrical architecture coincide with the 
limits of the panel is proper to the Sienese of the Trecento. The An- 
nunciation by Daddi in the Louvre furnishes a very nearly contemporary 
instance of an angel attending the annunciate angel. 

In the aureoles here as well as in those of Mr. Loeser’s Dormition, 
Jacopo has incised small figures. The only other Tuscan and nearly 
contemporary instances of figures incised in the gold of a painting, are 
furnished by the six scenes from the life of the Baptist in the Kaiser- 


25 


Friedrich Museum, Berlin, by Deodato Orlandi, and by his signed and 
dated (1301) polyptych in the Museo Civico in Pisa. 


Florence, Palazzo dell Arte della lana, Tabernacle. Virgin, Saints and 
Angels. (Fig. 2). 

The tradition of Jacopo’s authorship of this altarpiece goes back to 
the sixteenth century,’ and continues unquestioned to our own day. It 
constitutes together with the Cagnola triptych a basis for all other at- 
tributions to Jacopo. Cleaning, reguilding, repainting, have left very 
little of the original surface. 

Disparities of scale and of state, discrepancy between the moments 
of their painting, cannot obscure the pervasive affinities of this panel 
to the Cagnola triptych. Beginning with the expressions, which in 
both panels betray the same degree and orbit of consciousness, the Vir- 
gins have the same long heads and are very similar in features — by 
the nature of the differences mentioned, sharper in the small picture. 
The glance, the soft mouth, the yielding chin, are identical, and the 
light covers the same saliencies and curvatures of the surface, only it 
is not as concentrated in the tabernacle, because it has larger areas to 
cover. The Infant has the same action, a similar pose and the same 
round eyes. 

The closeness of these affinities together with the stylistic differences 
between our altarpiece and other of Jacopo’s works, determine the 
chronological gap between the two paintings just confronted. 

The action of the Child, its type, the soft draperies, seem cribbed 
from Duccio, while the Evangelist is reminiscently Giottesque. 

The lunette” over this panel has been erroneously regarded by the 
same hand. Horne attributes it to Jacopo, and reinforces his view with 
reproductions (Rivista d’arte, 1909). But a glance would expose his 
mistake, the lunette having been obviously painted at the fag-end of 
the century by some follower of Niccold di Pietro Gerini;” not unlikely 
by the “peggior maestro che Jacopo non era” of whom Vasari (vol. I, 
p. 670) says that he had “rifatto” the painting. 


Milan, Don Guido Cagnola. Small Triptych. (Fig. 1). 


First mentioned by Suida, Kunstchronik, XVII, 1906, 335. The 
base of the central panel bears the signature IACOBUS. DE. CASEN- 
TINO. ME. FECIT. Radical for an integration of the painter’s artistic 
personality. 

The traits of this picture which prove themselves essential by per- 
sisting, albeit with slight variations, in subsequent works, are all present 
in the head of the Virgin: the low forehead, the long smooth cheek, the 
globular chin, the full sensuous lips, the lower one often, as here, sucked 
in, the upper one showing a wide space between the crests; the height 
between it and the nose, especially in the earlier works, the tired and 
always submissive languor in the look, with a sickle of light under the 
eye. 

Though the throne is the kind Taddeo Gaddi continues to use in the 


26 


latter part of his life, and though the borders are in part stamped; the 
rude execution, the tooling.of the broad border in the central panel, the 
arrangement, and the dingy severity and abstraction of the personages, 
urge the likelihood of an early date. Confrontation with his other 
works leads us to the same conclusion. ‘The lights detach themselves 
sharply from the shadow as in Pacino di Bonaguida, the Cecilia Master, 
in a way proper to the Byzantinizing Dugento. 


Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser. Small Virgin, Saints and Angels. 


Recognized by its owner more than twenty years ago (later also by 
Mr. F. Mason Perkins) as a work of Jacopo’s. 

Very good state. Measuring m. .673 x .385, this panel was probably 
once the central compartment of a triptych. It repeats the head and 
the pattern of the Virgin (S.P. 13, 12) in the tabernacle of the Palazzo 
dell’Arte della lana, and the drapery leaves the same part of the hair 
uncovered. The eye sinks identically beyond the slightly projecting 
cheek, which drops to the same heavy chin. The Infant is held in the 
same way, only he leans over more obliquely, and though the picture, 
having preserved its original surface, does not show the same contrasts 
of lights and shadows as the majority of Jacopo’s works, the flesh covers 
the same bony structure everywhere. 

If the composition is more evolved than those of the larger altarpieces, 
it is not therefore necessarily later. It must be remembered that the 
full-sized panel tends to conform to the changeless nature of churchly 
functions, the liturgy and the architecture: it is conventional, less muta- 
ble, and its execution materially more limited, than the small tabernacle, 
which intended for more intimate worship, might vary with the personal 
whim of artist or patron; and being smaller, the material limitations of 
its paintings are, as all through Italian painting, more elastic. 

The soft light and shade of Sienese painting, that seems to pass over 
the Florentine structure of some of the angels’ faces, may be what 
remained in Jacopo’s memory of some work of Simone’s or Lippo 
Memmi’s. 


Berlin, (formerly Gottingen, University Museum) Kaiser-Friedrich Mus- 
eum. Virgin, Saints and Angels. 
Unsparingly renovated. Numbered tog1 in the “Verzeichnis der 
Gemalde” (1921), the panel measures m. .45 x .23. 


Gottingen, University Museum. Lateral Leaves to the Above Virgin, etc. 
The triptych was published by Prof. Osvald Sirén (I, 190; II, plate 
r70)i 
The moulding and the shape of the central panel carry us back to 
the Cagnola Virgin. The flat-backed throne, the severity of arrange- 
ment, the vertical superimposition of the heads, the solemnity and 
reticence also point to a relatively early period. The types, as far as 
we may trust the present state of the picture, recall Taddeo Gaddi and 
Bernardo Daddi. 


27 


Florence, Collection of Mr. Chas. Loeser. Half-length Virgin and Child. 


Measuring m. .815 x .503, this picture was once in the Chas. Butler 
Collection, there attributed to Luca di Tommé. It is in good state, and 
of a pale blond tone. 

Jacopo’s idiosyncracies appear in the structure of the Virgin’s head, 
the good-natured glance, the full lips, the long nose, the turn of the 
Child’s head (as in the Geneva and the Arte della lana panels) and 
its type. The association of the orange of the Child’s drapery with the 
red of the Virgin’s mantle is repeated again and again in Jacopo’s 
paintings. 

The stamps of the halos, which resemble those of the St. Bartholomew 
altarpiece, and the Trecento style, detain the impulsive temptation to 
date this panel very early. And why might not the striated drapery 
of the Virgin, the loop at the nose joining the brows, the right hand, 
the nostril, the carved nose, the pattern and action of the Child, all be 
due to a Ducciesque original Jacopo chose in this instance to imitate? 
The way the Child’s thumb is clapped down on the finch, and the edge 
of modelling shadow, again, carry us towards the Florentines of the first 
part of the fourteenth century, while the long head, and the tone, force 
it into the proximity of Mr. Loeser’s small Virgin. The date would 
vacillate between the Cagnola triptych and the last mentioned panel; 
it was certainly not painted later, and may even possibly fall among 
his earliest works. 

This picture embodies in equal measure the Florentine and the Duc- 
ciesque traditions. 


Arezzo, L’Ospedale, Sala dell’ Amministrazione. Small Panel. 
Published and recognized by Mario Salmi in Belvedere, March, 1924, 
119 - 123. 
The panel represents the Virgin and two impersonations of the Savior, 
with two small scenes below. 


Florence, Fondazione Horne. Virgin and Child. (Fig. 4). 

Published in the “Catalogo Illustrato della Fondazione Horne” (Fi- 
renze, 1921) p. 19, under number 46, as “Scuola di Duccio di Buo- 
ninsegna.” 

The panel measures m. .83 x .46, and bears a good deal of disguised 
retouching. . 

Though more solid and firmer in structure and treatment, in better 
state, and already presaging Jacopo’s relinquishment of the leptocephalic 
type, the Horne Virgin looks out of the same benevolent, heavily out- 
lined eyes as the Madonna (S.P. 11, 12) of the tabernacle of the Palaz- 
zo dell’Arte della lana, and professes the same ancestry in the long 
upper lip. The ears of the Children are the same, and the drawing of 
the foreshortened nose, the mouth, the eyes in one, and of the frontal 
heads in the tabernacle, follow the same formula. 

Under the Florentine forms the careful eye will note Sienese reminis- 


28 


cences: in the pattern of the Virgin’s head, in the Child’s action, in the 
drapery drooping against the Virgin’s left cheek, and in the intimacy 
of the mood. 


Florentine, Accademia delle Belle Arti. Three Panels Representing The 
Baptist (S. P. 6), Saint Nicholas (Fig. 5), St. John the Evangelist. 


Numbered 39, 44, 45, these panels, measuring individually m. 1.03 x 
.37, with a medallion each in the pinnacles, belong to the same original 
polyptych. The Baptist, if compared to the same figure in the taber- 
nacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana (S.P. 6, 5) shows the hair 
drawn back similarly over the temples, with such disparities in the 
stare of the symmetrical face as accord with the difference of period. 
The face of our Baptist is like those of the two other saints, already 
more vivid in expression than the figure in the tabernacle, and of a 
contrasting crispness in drawing, that anticipates Jacopo’s later works. 

In the head of St Nicholas the outline of the large eye goes the same 
way, and the iris lies in the same field of white, as those of the Horne 
Virgin. But for the greater heaviness of the latter, the faces of both 
are built over the same bony structure. ‘The ear is the same as the ear 
of the Horne Child. The pattern of the saint’s figure and that of the 
Virgin correspond, tapering similarly at the bottom. ‘The floreated halos 
of the three saints are variants of that of the Virgin. 

It is not unlikely that these saints at one time attended the Horne 
Madonna in a common altarpiece. They belong, at all events, to the 
same moment in his evolution, and that moment is nearer to the large 
Tabernacle than to the Saint Bartholomew. 


Lucca. Private Collection. Madonna and Child. 
The figure of the Child partly lost. In weight, in design, in dimen- 
sions, in feeling, it follows the Horne picture; and falls about midway 
between Jacopo’s earlier and later works. 


Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Magazine. Virgin and Child. 

This uninspired panel bearing the number 104 and measuring m. .58 
x .385, was originally pointed, and has been cut down to a rectangle. 
Parts of the drapery have been repainted. 

It shows the Virgin in three-quarter view to slightly below the knee, 
holding the Child, who is toying with her white scarf. 

The types, the proportions of the face, put it into the late middle 
period of Jacopo’s activity. 


Eastnor Castle (England), Lord Somers. Four Saints. 


Wings of a dismembered altarpiece. 
Although I have seen these in very inadequate reproduction, I feel 
certain they are by the master. 


Florence, Uffizi. St. Bartholomew Enthroned and Angels. (Fig. 6). 
Published and reproduced for the first time by Khvoshinsky and 


29 


Salmi, Pittori Toscani, Rome 1914, II, 25, fig. 25; see also Sirén, I, 191; 
II, pl. 171; and in The Burlington Magazine, Nov., 1914. Mercilessly 
rubbed down, what is left on the tall panel, especially the adherence of 
the high lights to the apple-green underpainting exhibits the technique 
of the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, and of the Horne 
Virgin. The heads of the angel playing the viol at the right, and of the 
Horne Virgin (S. P. 3, 11) are in point of pondus of the drawing of par- 
ticulars, of expression, derivation, of the same fundamental formula. 
The frontality of the saint, his right arm and hand are those of the S. 
Miniato (Fig. 9) — the posture recalling at once the Christ Enthroned 
in the Giottesque altarpiece in the sacristy at St. Peter’s, Rome, and the 
Evangelist of Donatello. It may have served as model to Lorenzo di 
Niccold for his St. Bartholomew in the Gallery at S. Gimignano. 

The gorgeous stamped halos and broad borders, and the frame, occur 
in paintings by Daddi dating from the late thirties and the forties of the 
fourteenth century.” Their presence, together with the loose drawing 
tend to push the painting of this altarpiece, in spite of local archaisims, 
up towards the middle of the century. 


Princeton, New Jersey, The late Prof. Allan Marquand. Small Cruci- 
fixion. (Fig. 7). 

In a very fair state of preservation. The frame and the painting are 
one panel, measuring m. 1.265 x.49. ‘The Christ recurs in the right 
shutters of the Cagnola, and Bondy triptychs, and in the Crucifixion at 
Gottingen. In all four, Jacopo used with inessential variations the same 
anatomical formula for the Crucified and the same facial mask. The 
light touching the ridges makes the same arabesque, only less prominent 
in the enamel of the uncorrupted Princeton picture. The loincloth 
altered slightly in the Bondy and Gottingen panels, assumes the sharp 
folds and the hang of that of the Cagnola triptych. 

The tension of the tragic mood as much as the refined execution, and 
the structure of the long: heads, approximate Prof. Marquand’s picture 
to Mr. Loeser’s Dormition. The small hand with the delicate wrist, 
and the drapery will also be found there. Indeed, it is more than likely 
the composition is taken bodily from some Giottesque model. 

The foliations painted on dark ground around the bust of the Eternal 
in the pinnacle occur often in the works of Pacino di Bonaguida. 

The eye that remembers Sienese types, especially those of Pietro 
Lorenzetti, will find them in some of the heads. 


Scarperia, Madonna di Piazza. Virgin with two Angels. (Fig. 8). 

In a partially ruined and restored condition. The pattern of the 
Virgin’s head and the fall of the drapery over it, imitate those of the 
Horne Virgin, but the tight fit of the flesh over the bony structure of 
the head, the opaque enamel, the prefunctory outline, put it conclusively 
among Jacopo’s later works, and explicitly near the S. Miniato. The 
type of the Virgin and her flatness, her right hand, possess essential 


30 


affinities with this figure, while the angels are sisters to those who at- 
tend Our Lady in the Bondy triptych. We must not in an eclectic like 
Jacopo, be surprised to find that the plan of the picture reverts to an 
early Trecento adaptation of an earlier compositional motif. The type 
of throne recalls a brief fashion initiated by the S. Cecily Master. 


Paris Market (1925). Virgin and Two Saints. 


Recognized by Osvald Sirén. Seen only in photograph. A charming 
full-length Virgin in unrestored, though partly ruined state. 


New York, Collection of Mr. Maitland F. Griggs. Madonna. 


The picture is not in a condition to permit a secure judgment regard- 
ing authorship further than to say that it was certainly painted in the 
shop of Jacopo del Casentino. Included here however among his own 
works because the design and the mass have a dignity due doubtless 
to the master himself, and marred only in subsequent remaniements. 
The dimensions of the panel are m. .736 x .445. 

The halo runs in concentric course around the heads as in the St. 
Bartholomew altarpiece and approximates it also in its types and style. 
The head of the Virgin closely resembles that of the same figure in a 
panel owned by a Paris dealer in 1925, and that of the Scarperia 
Madonna. 


Geneva, Villa Ariana. Virgin and Child. 


Battered and clumsily repainted. 

The round plump faces, the features, the smooth enamel, join this to 
the Scarperia panel. The right hand of the Virgin has the same fingers 
and the eyes the same sheepish glance. The halos are stamped in the 
fashion of the middle of the century. 


Florence, S. Miniato. S. Miniato with Scenes from his Life. (Figs. 9, 
WORT T 12). 

Hitherto, on different occasions attributed to the Maestro di S. Ce- 
cilia, first by Berenson Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 1901; 
also by Suida (Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 1905, 
IO1); most recently by Sirén (Burlington Magazine, Dec., 1919, 230) 
and Van Marle, III (1924), 291, 654. Ascribed by Crowe and Caval- 
caselle (ed. Murray, II, 246) to Agnolo Gaddi, while Dami (Bollettino 
d’arte, 1915, 239) gives it to “unknown, but direct pupil of Giotto.” ” 

This altarpiece, standing about two metres high, is being rescued 
from complete destruction by (let us hope) discreet restoration. 

The head of the S. Miniato bears an insinuating, if not an obvious, 
resemblance to the Cagnola Virgin; the length of the heads and the 
features are in their proportions the same. The two heads first com- 
pared in detail (the light-edged cheek-bones, the long flat cheeks filling 
at the jaws which run into the well-rounded chins) the synthetic like- 
ness, should finally become more evident. Less demonstrable, but per- 
haps as deep, are the affinities between S. Miniato’s head, and that of 


31 


the Horne Virgin (S.P. 8, 11). His ear—the large ear typical for 
Jacopo, whose contours sweep upward in a wide curve that turns inward 
abruptly at the top, dropping in a straight diagonal to the cheek — is 
the same as the ear of the Horne Child (S.P. 8, 9). 

The low narrow foreheads, and the hair trained back over the ears, 
which Jacopo had a fondness for showing, the wide span from crest to 
crest in the upper lip —a conspicuous and significant departure from 
the traditionally sharp caret of his Florentine contemporaries — the 
long nose, the long flat cheek, were only in inessential aspects from the 
corresponding particulars in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte 
della lana, and find their closest resemblance in the angels nearest the 
Virgin (S.P. 8, 7). The wide, kindly, unthinking eyes admit you into 
the same inner void, and the structure has the same weaknesses. 

It is precisely in the absence of structural codrdination or of weight, 
in the generalizing contour, which maintains a relative flatness, that I 
see an advanced stage in Jacopo’s activity. The presence of the veined 
pavement in the S. Miniato and in the S. Bartholomew, the resemblance 
of the right arms; of the patterns, and curling flat fingers of the right 
hands, put both altarpieces within the same period. The Scarperia 
picture joins these, and three between them establish themselves in a 
chronological field, which in the series of Jacopo’s surviving work should 
follow the middle point of his activity. 

The flayed and otherwise martyred miniatures flanking the saint, are 
evolved beyond the large figure. The drawing is summary, external 
and diagrammatic, but on the most advantageous side of these qualifi- 
cations; if summary it is adequate, if external it is unhampered, if 
diagrammatic it is decisive. A rhythmic movement codrdinates the 
figure, which functions rather as pattern than as structure —a pattern 
placed and distributed in well-felt relation to the total surface. ‘There 
is an unwonted freedom and an ease in the postures and the action. 
The faces are rounder and fuller even than in the presumably later 
Bondy triptych, the eyes large, almost circular, with a light-colored iris, 
and the draperies softer than elsewhere in Jacopo’s panels. 

All these characters move it farther away from the Cagnola picture 
than from the triptych just named, nearer the trefoils of the St. Bar- 
tholomew altarpiece, than to the Loeser Dormition. 

Happily we possess a series of documented dates to which it would 
be possible to anchor the S. Miniato altarpiece, and which would con- 
firm our conclusions. The chapel of S. Miniato for which it was com- 
missioned was being decorated between 1335 and 1342." As the altar- 
piece is a chapel’s most important adornment, it was painted within, or 
a trifle beyond, these limits, as suggested by Luigi Dami (Bollettino 
d’arte, 1915, p. 239). 

This painting should be regarded Jacopo’s masterpiece, and its ac- 
ceptance as his work, completely alter our obsolete views of him. 


32 


Florentine Market (1926). St. Lucy. 


Measures m. 1.30.68. Fine figure closely resembling the S. Miniato, 
but fuller, and looser in treatment. 


Paris Market (1925). Coronation of The Virgin. 


Seen only in reproduction which nevertheless reveals restoration of 
what would seem a rather weak original. The types commit it to 
Jacopo’s late period. 


Brussels, Museum. Virgin and Child. 


Correctly attributed (without knowledge of my publication in Bollet- 
tino, etc., 1923) by M. Salmi, Belvedere, 1924, 120. 

Hanging under No. 3019 this picture bears the designation “Ecole 
de Sienne.” 

In posture, in the draping of the figures it recalls the Horne Virgin, 
with less nerve and significance in its modelling. The hasty execu- 
tion, the superficial drawing, the shallowness of expression, draw this 
painting into Jacopo’s last period, close to the Paolini Madonna. 


Roma, Prof. Paolo Paolini. Madonna and two Angels. (S.P. 14). 


Battered and restored, what the past has left of it invites a confron- 
tation with the Horne Virgin (S.P. 14, 11). The silhouettes are a 
perfect match, and the drapery falls over the heads in accordance 
with the same fashion. ‘The similar state of the flesh in both manifests 
the same construction in light and shade, the same placing of accents. 
But the brisk glance, the shorter upper lip, the rounder, more compact 
face; the similarity of the hands and of the placing and action of the 
angels, to the Scarperia picture — considering the nature of the analo- 
gies between our panel and the Horne Virgin — put it nearer this. The 
round eye, the unemphatic drawing and modelling, the execution, force 
it into the milieu of the stories around S. Miniato. 


Pavia, Galleria Malaspina. Two Wings to Small Triptych. 
Published and recognized by Mario Salmi in Belvedere, March, 1924, 
119 - 123. 
The individual panels measure m. .446x.15. 


Vienna, Collection of Oscar Bondy. Small Tabernacle. (Fig. 13). 

The central panel measures m. .40x.215. The modelling follows 
the structure of the heads in earlier pictures. The light running around 
the eye, straight down the ridge of the nose, and gliding along the plump 
jaws, stars the plump chin. The thatched shed in the Nativity is the 
shed of the Gottingen pictures, only the feeling is gentler. The ar- 
rangement of the central panel carries us back to the Loeser Virgin 
with saints and angels; and the St. Catherine has remained true to the 
long-headed kind of the Tabernacolo della Tromba, only the company 
has grown gayer. 

The more continuous planes and an expression less charged or 


oo 


a 


strained, however, place our tabernacle at a considerable distance from 
the Cagnola triptych, while the form of the Gothic throne more de- 
veloped than in the foregoing works, the freer arrangement, the rus- 
tling movement, the dainty types, take it definitely into the last period 
of Jacopo’s activity. 

On the whole this is the prettiest of Jacopo’s smaller pictures. 


Frankfort, Staddel Institut. Small Virgin, Saints and Angels and two 
Donors. 

First recognized by Mr. Chas. Loeser. 

Thoroughly repainted and truncated, this picture, originally cusped, 
repeats the Bondy composition, though the border is tooled as in much 
earlier panels. The round-faced types, too, recall the Bondy heads. 

The lofty Virgin sits high, holds her legs, and makes a pattern from 
top to bottom, like our Lady in Lippo Memmi’s S, Gimignano Maesta. 


Out of the association of these works, a coherent personality for the 
first time shapes itself —a determinate presence, constant to a pur- 
poseful principle, and moving in its own world. The world of supreme 
masters has range, hope, and a self-established reality of existence that 
the poor world of actuality seems long ago to have lost; the one offers 
us a rapturous liberation from the other. But Jacopo’s world is nar- 
rower and less resourceful, with definite boundaries in all directions; 
affording peculiar charms and interests to be sure, but rarely filling the 
imagination. Its inhabitants are shy, timid and vaguely expectant, 
for his is a world also that furnishes no occasions either for the proof, 
of courage nor, of the capacity to face crises ; a sort of paradise without 
serpents, but also without beatitudes. Save where he leans on other 
masters, Jacopo’s personages and their doings want both in moral ef- 
fort or moral effectuality; they content themelves with the mild 
blessedness of acquiescence in unrealized or unadventured hopes. And 
seldom suggesting prolongations into larger realms of being, they even 
more rarely create about them an environment which undeniably jus- 
tifies them. 

Jacopo’s world is accordingly wanting in significance. And as in 
all representative art — which works through material forms —the 
sense of moment involves that of physical consequence, the lack of one 
means also the lack of the other; and Jacopo’s figures that have failed 
to impress us as persons, do not force us to an acceptance of their ma- 
terial existence. They function rather as illustrations of moods or qual- 
ities, and his form tends with listless repetition to become diagram- 
matic as in the late Florentine Trecentisti. 

Nor is the setting of the figures any more real. They are placed 


34 


against gilt backgrounds, put there by an automatic tradition rather 
than by an imagination that has fathomed the spatial possibilities of 
the gold plane. 

All this explains why his full-sized altarpieces seem puffed out be- 
yond their normal scale, and why they resemble conventional tableaux. 
The genre, as it reached him, was too monumental for his natural lean- 
ings and limitations; and the prescribed decorum of the sacred person- 
ages, their immobility, were too full of implications of timelessness and 
of the infinite, to be contained or apprehended by so restricted an in- 
telligence. They absorbed him too much by their bulk alone; before 
them one rescued one’s waning private identity with anxious effort. 

Constrained and hollow in his altarpieces, he naturally inclined to 
miniature. Here on the contrary one’s defenses were not directly 
challenged, and while the representations were large enough to be 
easily legible, one was not obliged to merge oneself in a magnified spe- 
‘cies of existence. Miniature from the first assumes our superiority, to 
which we contentedly expand in the dreaming background of con- 
sciousness. It is the normal medium for presenting a content that 
maintains a merely human scale, and does not demand the exertion 
required of us in order that we may become the equal of large paint- 
ings. By it, as we sometimes Gulliver-like swell to flattering propor- 
tions, we shrink at others to feel ourselves in the warm keeping of some 
benignant grace or friendly power. 

As large altarpieces with their despotic symmetry are full of eternal 
connotations, miniature registers the passing and progressive, concerned 
normally with what people do, rather than with what they are, with 
continuity rather than with a state. Over it the eye travels more rap- 
idly, and more readily organizes the smaller units to an embracing 
synthesis. 

So that while his magnified Madonnas and magnified angels look 
out upon us with a tolerance and a kindliness too familiar for their as- 
sumed grandeur, his miniatures open upon a world that is more credi- 
ble, trustworthy and authentic. 

Here the holy persons are so small they might be held in the palm 
of one’s hand. Without a trace of supercilious detachment they seem 
willing to share their merely human warmth with the heart of the 
worshipper. More than that, these Virgins and these angels don’t 
seem to want to conceal the profane feminine allurements in the deli- 
cate bloom of their plump cheeks, and in their curved lips. Almost 
aware of them they release the coquetry of women that trouble the 


35 


earth. There is a reassuring and rustling uneasiness among them that 
suggests an impatience of divine discipline. 

The small scenes of the S. Miniato altarpiece reveal Jacopo under 
the greatest variety of aspects. In it we read the tale of the saint, his 
miracles and his passion, in a series from top to bottom in tall well- 
spaced compartments. A slow tempo is sustained in the telling of it, so 
that the narrative is not interrupted by dramatic outbreaks until the 
end, where with something like a flash of tragic terror the decapitated 
saint sets his head on his shoulders and hurries up the steep rock. But 
in all the other scenes he moves with a grave and graceful detachment 
among his persecutors, who form a sort of shadowy nimbus about him. 
No figure acts with more than a vague equivocal participation in what 
itis about. But rather than produce a sense of inherent continuity, the 
story is told in a series of postures, of tableaux, each isolated by its bi- 
lateral arrangement, with the saint occupying the centre. 

The representation is sustained in the foremost plane. The figure 
is neither so modelled nor so placed as to prove the space beyond and 
round it as real as the space it occupies; the filled space does not gen- 
erate the empty space, as in the good Giottesque, in whom plasticity 
in compositional tension produces the effect of a fuller and acuter 
reality. In his miniatures as in his large altarpieces he is mildly sug- 
gestive and pleasantly decorative. 

The discrepancies between the figure of S. Miniato and the figures 
in the small scenes around him, represent the differences of type and of 
style between his larger and his smaller pictures. In the former the 
heads change with time from the dolicocephalic to the round-faced type 
with increasing softness and plumpness of cheek and chin: the flesh 
almost always suggesting a specific degree of consistency. The fore- 
head is relatively low; the lips full and sinuous, the lower one sucked 
in, the upper showing a wide span between the rounded crests. The 
chin is sleek and bossy. The eye long and heavily outlined, wears a 
tired or submissive or timid look. A sickle of light under it cuts into 
the shadow of the cheek. The iris is generally pale, the nose long. His 
figures are heavy without weight, and expressive without depth. But 
the smaller scale of the miniatures minimizes all deficiencies: in them 
the bodily structure is firmer and better determined to movement. 
There is, accordingly, more grace in the small figures, which are daint- 
ily proportioned and round in face. The eye is almost circular. The 
wrists small and delicate. 

I am well aware that these isolated peculiarities, exhibiting habits 


36 


and preferences of an artistic practitioner are not the artistic determi- 
nants. How the hand betrays its way with the material, what shapes 
taste habitually selects, how a personal tempo guides the line round 
them and the shadow over them, by what rhythmic principle they dis- 
pose themselves in a given area, and how they fill a given space — shall 
remain, I fear, secrets between the artist’s structural and organic idio- 
syncracies, his vision, and their adjustments to the externalizing 
media: secrets that choose to reveal themselves at odd and happy mo- 
ments to special susceptibilities only. And yet it is by them that an 
artist is a painter rather than a poet, or a musician. 

If, then, this enumeration should fail to characterize Jacopo, it 
should help to localize in different works those characters that are con- 
stant in a single personality. 

But to make all conclusiveness in this matter uncommonly hard, 
within the unchanging Jacopo, we find the hungry restlessly Protean 
eclectic, imitating Giotto at one moment (in the Loeser Dormition), at 
another Simone (in Mr. Loeser’s small Madonna, Saints and Angels), 
at another still Pietro Lorenzetti (in the Marquand and Cagnola pan- 
els) and constituting a shifting, nebulous, secondary personality, which 
often dims the real Jacopo. 

And incidental to his electicism is an archaism which baffles all 
effort at a satisfactory chronology; an archaism manifesting itself un- 
der a variety of forms, most explicitly in the use of striated Byzantine 
drapery (in the Loeser half-length Virgin, in the large tabernacle), in 
the tooled design of the gold backgrounds, in the frontal pose (the St. 
Bartholomew, the S. Miniato) ; in the shape of the S. Miniato panel, 
in the scale and relation of the scale of its central figure to that of the 
small scenes (instanced among surviving Florentine pictures in the 
Magdalen now at the Florentine Academy) ; in the compositional for- 
mula of the Scarperia and the Paolini Virgins.” 

All these obscuring difficulties notwithstanding, his works assert 
one solid unchanging fact: that the type and the sentiment are of non- 
Florentine derivation. The flesh that covers the bone of the face in- 
stead of the Florentine hardness imitates its physical properties; the 
responsive and self-revealing eye, the sensuous lips, the graceful ges- 
ture of the body (in the miniatures especially) seem to involve an in- 
fluence whose cadenced movement of line and nuanced mobility of 
expression distinguish it from the architectural stability and averaged 
expression of Florentine painting — and that is the art of Siena. 

His Sienese leanings’ show further in such more evasive particu- 


37 


lars as the habitual silhouette of the head in the narrowing of the pat- 
tern of single half-lengths at the bottom, the clinging hang of the 
drapery (in the Horne and Paolini Virgins, in the Academy saints), 
the consciousness of the curling fingers, the undulant upper lip with a 
wide space between the crests (so different from the sharp caret of the 
orthodox Florentine). Of Sienese origin might also easily be the striated 
drapery he effects, and the white-kerchiefed female heads (in the Berlin 
and Cagnola pictures). 

This influence is worked deeply into the tissue of Jacopo’s painting, 
present at almost every moment of his evolution from the beginning, 
as it would appear, and increasing at the end — an influence differing 
in its nature from the other Florentine instances of the Cioni, of Ber- 
nardo Daddi, in whom the Sienese have left only a reflection of their 
retreating light. In Jacopo, the Florentine substance seems to melt into 
foreign moulds, even if the line never learns the Sienese magic, and the 
heavy forms weigh down the assumed refinements. 

But while these enumerations indicate a general Sienese influence, 
in his earlier works they bear the specific stamp and accent of a single 
source — of Duccio or someone in his circle. One may follow the re- 
semblance between the two masters in the radical images, the long 
heavy faces, the eye marked by a contour which isolates a similar area, 
and harbors a similar meaning, the yielding lower lip and chin — all 
appropriations of a critically formative moment in Jacopo’s develop- 
ment. The round-eyed Child not only derives from a Ducciesque model 
but apes its playful action, pulling at the Mother’s scarf by preference. 
And the sentimental motif, the tenderness of the glance, the dream of 
sacred motherhood, are Ducciesque. 

And indeed why should the preponderant presence of his works in 
Florence make him a Florentine at his origins? Does he not come 
from the Casentino? And if brought to Florence by Taddeo (as Vasari 
tells us) was it not — as he was presumably Taddeo’s senior — likely 
after his apprenticeship? One might even assume by stretching prob- 
abilities, that Jacopo’s Pratovecchio or some neighboring town afforded 
him, for a brief interval at least, his rudiments under some Sienese 
master. 

Or was it in Florence itself that his first critical encounter with Sien- 
ese painting took place? Considering the nature of its influence on the 
Florentine painting of the earlier Trecento, we should incline to be- 
lieve him brought up in a centre where this influence was more opera- 
tive, or where, at all events, there was a relative profusion of Sienese 


38 


works. Such a centre existed not far from Pratovecchio, in Arezzo, 
where the living evidence of the frescoed walls of S. Domenico, and the 
Lorenzetti polyptych at the Pieve, should secure Vasari’s testimony, 
and prove Arezzo to have been at least equally accessible to the influ- 
ences of both schools. 

And yet the Sienese characters in Jacopo’s early painting presum- 
ably representing wilful choice, are from the first found imbedded in a 
sturdy, north-Tuscan substratum. 

In his earliest two panels (the Loeser Dormition and the large tab- 
ernacle), he is ravenously Giottesque with a trailing baggage of provin- 
cial traits. It is the testimony of this tabernacle, and the persistence 
of long reiterated tradition (founded as we have seen on a confusion), 
that has led Horne to the outwardly secure view that Jacopo was a 
direct pupil of Giotto — a notion that has the venerable precedent of 
an early sixteenth century source, the most ancient authority for 
Jacopo, the Anonimo Gaddiano;* and Dami (in the Bollettino d’arte 
for 1915, 23) sees in the S. Miniato altarpieces the work of one of the 
“primi diretti discepoli di Giotto;” Khvoshinsky and Salmi (Pittori 
Toscani II, 25), with caution rather than discrimination regard him a 
Giottesque influenced by Daddi. 

Now, the two pictures just mentioned, furnish enough ground to 
anyone determined on it for the assumption of more of the “Giottesque” 
ingredient in a hypothetical, still earlier — the prehistoric — Jacopo. 
Yet, these two pictures, in which he is more Giottesque than in any 
that follow, should no more prove Giotto to have been his teacher, than 
the resemblance of the Berlin Virgin to Taddeo, or of its side wings to 
Daddi, would prove either of these to have been. What he took from 
Giotto the air was thick with, and he took, as we have seen, from every 
quarter, remaining constant only in his inveterate north-Tuscan sense 
of falling mass, his Sienese habits of drawing certain details, and in his 
Sienese lyricism. Still young, and impressionable enough on his ar- 
rival in Florence, to absorb the Giottesque shop-conventions, at the 
time overwhelmingly in fashion, he copies Giotto’s Ognissanti Dormi- 
tion; but in the tabernacle the Giottesque elements become more 
generic, mingling with types he borrowed from Gaddi, and with remi- 
niscences of Duccio. In the Berlin panel which cannot have been 
painted much later, the Sienese and Giottesque characters alike, con- 
ceal themselves behind unequivocally Gaddesque mood and Gaddesque 
types. But Taddeo’s influence, acute at this moment, leaves no per- — 
manent traces. 


a9 


The fact is Jacopo’s taste, his temper and his limitations com- 
mitted him rather to the current in the Florentine painting of the early 
Trecento which rose from more archaic sources, chose a different 
course, and flowed towards a destination opposed to that of Giotto. A 
decade or two back it contented itself with the narrow channel made 
for it by the Master of St. Cecily — Bernardo Daddi’s direct artistic 
forbear and, with relative certainty, his living teacher. 

At least one work of Jacopo’s, the S. Miniato altarpiece, bears evi- 
dences of admiring imitation of this exquisite artist.” The style of the 
Paolini Virgin, the composition of this and of the Scarperia panels, 
maintain the tendency of this testimony. 

But it is to Daddi, who carries on the tradition of the Cecily Master, 
that Jacopo owes more than to any other single Florentine. His in- 
fluence which, as I have hinted, appears in the side wings of the Berlin 
panel, continues profound, outlasting presumably the intimate con- 
tacts between the two painters. All that Jacopo could absorb from 
Daddi is already present in the earlier Cagnola triptych, but, Daddi’s 
exclusive influence in some of the heads and in the Crucified here, and 
elsewhere, in the broad and richly stamped borders, and halos in jux- 
taposed courses, in his stacking of angels about the Virgin’s throne, in 
the unvarying pattern and type of the Crucified, urge the conclusion 
that, in his restless susceptibility, and insofar as he was become Floren- 
tine, his art was anchored to this one of all his Florentine contem- 
poraries. Yet this attachment gave way, now and again, as the years 
ran their course, before a nostalgic reversion to his early Sienese 
sympathies. 


40 


NOTES 


1. This essay appeared originally in a briefer form in the Bollettino d’arte, for December, 1923, 
248-284, where the majority of Jacopo’s paintings are given in reproduction. 


2. In a scrupulously learned article in the Rivista d’arte for 1909, 95 et seq. 


3. Vasari continues hopelessly muddled, in his second edition, on the artistic identity of Jacopo. 
And while he soberly forbears citing the epitaph reproduced in the first edition (see Vasari, I, 
675, n. 3) which claims Jacopo painted in fresco and never on panel, his second edition inherits a 
leaning to this error. Horne, unable to resist Vasari’s testimony, adduces the technique of the 
Cagnola triptych in support of the more moderate view that Jacopo was primarily a frescoist 
(Rivista d’arte, 1909, 108). But the absence from his verified oeuvre of a single fresco, and 
Jacopo’s partiality besides, to the miniature mode, should persuade the student that his painting 
in fresco was probably minimal, or at best, secondary to his panel painting. It is this fundamental 
error, however, that leads Vasari into the further blunder of attributing to Jacopo the sixteen 
figures in the vaults, and the paintings on the walls and pilasters, in Or S. Michele, which are 
obviously by several hands, and of later date. In an inauspicious moment Horne saw in these 
vaults affinities to Giov. dal Ponte and Bicci di Lorenzo. 

The fresco in the tabernacle “dirimpetto a S. Giuseppe” (Vasari, I, 670) Milanesi declares in 
his notes to have been “rifatto.” The incised contours and the faint color that remain of this 
complete wreck exhibit the unmistakable hand of a Gerinesque master of the end of the century. 
The other tabernacle Vasari attributes to Jacopo, in the Via di Cocomero in Florence, has dis- 
appeared. Of the frescoes Vasari ascribes to him in Arezzo, in the Episcopal Palace, in the 
Cathedral, in the churches of St. Bartholomew, Compagnia Vecchia di S. Giovanni, S. Domenico, 
S. Agostino, in the Pieve, the Duomo Vecchio, either no traces remain, or what remains cannot be 
retained as his. Finally the altarpiece which Vasari affirms to have been painted by Jacopo for 
the chapel of the Company of St. Luke was paid for to Niccolo di Pietro Gerini in 1383 (see Vas., 
I, 675, note i). 

Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 175, 176, extended the confusion by mixing Jacopo’s work with 
Giovanni del Ponte; a confusion spread also by Milanesi, who attributes to Jacopo, Giov. dal 
Ponte’s polyptych in the National Gallery in London (see Vasari, I, 671, notes 1 and 3). Pietro 
Toesca (in L’Arte, 1904, 49 et seq.), and Carlo Gamba (Rassegna d’arte, 1904, 177 et seq.), were 
the first to rescue Giovanni from it. Venturi again (V, 864) wrongly attributes to Jacopo no. 26, 
Sala III, in the Museum of Pisa; and the editors of Murray’s edition of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, 
see his hand in No. 20, Sala I, of the Arezzo Gallery, which is certainly not by him. 


4. See Sirén’s article (Burlington Magazine for November, 1914, 78), the conclusions of which he 
later (Giotto and Some of his Followers, I, 189, 192) completely reverses. A small Virgin with 
Saints and Angels in the Gallery at Budapest published by Gabriel de Terey in the Burlington 
Magazine, November, 1925, 251-252, as by Jacopo is by another follower of Daddi. 


5. The name of this legendary personage was, for no good reason, proposed by Venturi (1906, V, 
290) as the author of the four closing scenes of the St. Francis cycle in the Upper Church at 
Assisi, and of the altar-frontal from the Church of S. Cecilia now in the Uffizi. Sirén (The 
Burlington Magazine for December, 1919, January and October, 1920) amplifies the oeuvre of 
the painter of the S. Cecilia altarpiece by several acceptable additions, and by other less happy 
ones. See also Burlington Magazine for June, 1924, 271-278. 


6. Reproduced in Rivista d’arte, 1909, and Sirén, II, pl. 170. 
7. Vasari, I, 674, and note 2 thereto; also Horne, Rivista d’arte, 1909, 100, 101. 


8. The influence of Taddeo Gaddi in this and two or three other works of Jacopo’s, gives some color of 
likelihood to Vasari’s accounts of the relation between the two painters (see Vasari, I, 669, 670), 
although Jacopo might easily have been Taddeo’s senior. 


41 


13. 


14. 


15. 


16. 


17. 


18, 


19. 


. Under “Jacopo del Casentino” the Anonimo Gaddiano declares that “In Firenze si uede il taber- 


nacolo della Nostra Donna di Mercato Vecchio.” See Karl Frey, Codice Magliabechiano (Berlin, 
1872), 57; Vasari, I, 670; and Horne Rivista d’arte, 1909, 103, 104. 


. See detail in Bollettino d’arte, 1923, 253. 
. Van Marle, III, 654, cannot see the reason for this attribution. 


. Halos made from very nearly identical stamps may be seen in Daddi’s late polyptych at the Uffizi, 


and in two of his panels showing saints belonging to same original altarpiece; a bearded male 
saint in the Museo Bandini, Fiesole, and a female saint in the Serristori collection, Florence. 


Van Marle, III, 654, holds to the earlier view championed until recently by Sirén, who saw the 
justice of the present attribution the instant it was suggested. 


See Frey, who in his edition of Vasari (Munich, Georg Miiller, 1911), 321, 322, publishes docu- 
ments recording work executed for the altar of the titular saint. 


For the photograph bearing his correct attribution I am indebted to Dr. Giacomo De Nicola. 
This picture was published simultaneously with my article in the Bollettino d’arte for 1923 by 
Suida, Belvedere, 1923, 24, under the proper designation. 


The placing of angels over the shoulders of the throne, as it occurs in these two pictures, goes back 
to a tradition running back into the Dugento from the later examples of the St. Cecily Master’s 
Virgin at S. Margherita a Montici (near Florence), and of a Virgin of the early Trecento at S. 
Giorgio, Florence; to Cimabue’s Virgin at the church of the Servi, Bologna, the Virgin by the 
so-called Magdalen Master at S, Michele in Rovezzano, and Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Virgin at the 
church of the Servi in Orvieto, to still earlier variants. It was a very common composition in the 
thirteenth century. 


Van Marle’s III, 654, denial of a Sienese influence in Jacopo logically follows from his refusal of 
those panels to him which contain a large Sienese element. However, he seems to have overlooked 
a Sienese influence in some of those he admits as by Jacopo. 


In “Il Codice Magliabechiano,” ed. Frey, 57, the Anonimo speaks of “Jacopo di Casentino, pittore, 
discepolo do Giotto . . .” 


The frontality of the central figure in the S$. Miniato panel, the bi-lateral plan of the whole, and 
the architectural details hark back to the St. Cecily master. The scene at the lower left corner 
imitates the middle scene on the right in an altarpiece by the Cecily master at S. Margherita a 
Montici, representing St. Margaret and her legend; and the figure at her left is borrowed by 
Jacopo in the figure correspondingly placed in the upper right hand scene of the S, Miniato panel. 


42 


on! 


An kwh = 


eS 


gpeser 
5 


78) 


us 
US, 


5 ea 
: 


DETAILS FROM THE PainTINGS OF JACOPO DEL CASENTINO 


Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, Annunciation. 

Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, Dormition. 

Florence, Uffizi, St. Bartholomew Enthroned. 

Vienna, Bondy Collection, Triptych. 

Florence, Palazzo dell’ Arte della Lana, Tabernacle. 
Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, St. John, the Baptist. 
Florence, Palazzo dell’ Arte della Lana, Tabernacle. 
Florence, S. Miniato, S. Miniato and Scenes from his Life. 


9. 
10. 
id. 


Florence, Horne Foundation, Madonna. 

Gottingen, University Gallery, Triptych 

Florence, Horne Foundation, Madonna. 

Florence, Palazzo dell?’ Arte della Lana, Tabernacle. 

Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, Small Madonna, Saints and 
Angels. 


Rome, Paolini Collection, Madonna and Two Angels. 


PST ETT 


RIPTYCH 


T 
, Milan 


TINO: 


Jacopo DEL CasEN 


Ere eer: 


gnola 


Guido Ca 


Collection of Don 


~ 


Fic. 4. Jacopo pEL CasentTINo: MaponNna Fic. 2. Jacopo pet Casentino: Derart or LArce ALTARPIECE 


Horne Foundation, Florence Palazzo dell’ Arte della lana, Florence 


sé 
phate S 


Fic. 3. Jacovo pet Casentino: DorMition oF THE VIRGIN 
Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence 


ee 


} 
A 


~~ 


bh 


SAO WS AO ASS yy 


= 


a et poate 
Fic. 6. Jacovo pet Casentino: St. BaRTHOLOMEW Fic. 5. Jacopo pet Casentino: St. Nicnotas’ Fic. 7. JAcopo pet CasENTINO: CRUCIFIXION 
AND ANGELS Academy of Fine Arts, Florence Collection of the late Prof. Allan Marquand, Princeton, N. J. 


Uffizi Gallery, Florence 


NO: 


ASENTI 


(€ 
Derait or ALTARPI 


JACOPO DEL 
Church of S. 


NTINO: 


Fic. 8. Jacopo pEL CAsE 


ECE 


Vircin AND ANGELS 


@ 


, Florenc 


rato 


Min 


Madonna di Piazza, Scarperia 


U 
‘ | 
r < 
‘ -, - 
' 
, 
x 
4 ‘ 


Fic. 11. Jacopo pEL CasENTINO: SCENE FROM Fic. 12. Jacopo pEL CasENTINO: SCENE FROM 
THE ALTARPIECE OF S, Min1aTo THE ALTARPIECE OF S. MINIATO 
Church of S. Miniato, Florence Church of S. Miniato, Florence 


‘TRIPTYCH 


Jacopo DEL CASENTINO 


The Bondy Collect 


itive’, 113% 


Vienna 


ion, 


| a7 
: 
’ 4s A ~s 
y 
' o ~ 
: 
, 
’ ° 
‘ a 
Yi hae ‘ 
: 
‘ 
‘ 
, 
: 
i 
2 


ows ‘ajvunumwory orn 
: Utpurg ‘unasn py YIUuparsy-sasivy 


ATUL) GAWOVG AHL AO GNADAT 
aHL WOU SAGOSIdy] :1ddVvC Oday NYA vy “OU 


VLIaIqd FH], :Iddvq{ OduvNuag 40 UAMOTIOY “7 “OL 


UISDYWIGOT) “UWNISN $,WIJDIS 


ANOT, SMOIAVG AHL WAAO 
ONINOOMG NIOUIA sIddv(] OGUVNUAG AO AAMOTIOT ‘I ‘OT 


x40 X MAIN ‘uvuysaT dyy_ “4p fo worzI21]0/) 
ALIALLV |) aH Y, :IddadVvc] Odudv NYA AO UAMOTTIO Y AS “OT 


A DADDESQUE PREDELLA 


| ae small horizontal panel (Fig. 1), representing the Virgin 
swooning over the Saviour’s tomb is a part of a series that once 
formed a predella. It depicts the moment immediately after the slab 
had been placed over Christ’s body, which had been laid away and shut 
up in the sarcophagus; the stage of relaxed emotion following the 
tragic climax, when the Mother’s heart, having reached its limit of 
sorrow, overflows in a sort of rapture of pain, that finally sinks the 
senses into a blind and healing void. Standing against the shy morning 
light, Her companions pityingly watch Her grief. The heads lean 
over Her bowed figure and the rocks and trees gather round the little 
group by a sort of cosmic sympathy. The composition becomes thereby 
more concentrated than the more heroically tragic Pieta in Berlin, 
which presumably preceded this scene in the original predella. 

The dominant mood is announced in the bilateral arrangement, 
in which the trees and the figures converge rhythmically upon the 
center, where the figure of the Virgin breaks the symmetry. Her dark 
form is thrown against the light-colored tomb in a silhouette of sweep- 
ing contours, isolating Her in a private sorrow, vaguely accessible to 
Her companions, who are reduced to the role of helplessly sympathetic 
spectators. The composition is held compactly between the upright 
vermilion figure on the left and the St. Joseph on the right. The diag- 
onal figure of the Virgin joins these like the second stroke in an inverted 
N. The sustained lightness of color of the secondary characters makes 
a background, dramatically significant, for the black-mantled Protag- 
onist in an episode that strongly resembles the settling of the final chord 
of a sacred chant. 

The subject itself is exceedingly rare, and occurs, to my knowledge, 
in only one other instance, a small panel’ which hangs in the Pina- 
coteca Vaticana and represents the Crucifixion in the centre, with the 
Baptist and Paul at the sides, two scenes above, and the concluding 
episodes of the Passion below. The swooning Virgin closes the series 
in the lower right hand corner. 

The state of the panel is uncommonly sound, the surface has kept 
a good deal of its original crispness, the line and the incised contours, 
their sharpness, and the pigment its enamel and its suggestions of the 


43 


tempera vehicle. The individual colors, especially the blues, are un- 
marred, and the gold still has its lovely, luminous clearness. 

Though small in dimensions (8 x 15 inches) the picture displays a 
Florentine pattern and its classical tone, its controlled pathos, as defi- 
nitely join it to the Florentine tradition as they distinguish it from any 
other. But, if a Florentine, who is this master and what other extant 
works has he painted? To arrive at a solution of these problems it 
would first be necessary to recognize the differential type in the pre- 
della-piece under discussion. 

This is evolved in an artist by a gradual fixation of habits, at the ul- 
timate stage of artistic formation. Ina great age like that in which the 
little picture was painted, man was a completely and vitally functioning 
creature. He lived in a world of indisputable traditions in all matters 
of mind, faith, morals and economics. With these important details 
settled for him before he was born, he was free to go on undisturbed 
and single-hearted in his vocation. If he became a painter, he began 
by imitating the style and procedure of his teacher; and if gifted and 
endowed with creative energy besides, he unconsciously created his 
own type in the course of the years of apprenticeship and self-realiza- 
tion. His memory, little by little, found a formula for the shapes of na- 
ture he used in his paintings. This means that in his own practice 
every such shape was being reduced to a radical image, which was in 
some mysterious way determined by his organic, and by his structural 
constitution. Such a type, intimately individualized, underlies our 
little picture. While bare words cannot render its image to our minds, 
they can indicate the details that give it its distinguishing form. These 
details are the following: 


1. A solid enamel-like tempera with a milky quality in the flesh. 

2. A high-pitched color (the warm black of the Virgin’s robe with 
brown-violet high lights is uncommon). 

3. Oval-shaped heads with firm round cheeks. 

4. A small eye, tending to roundness. 

5. A daintily shaped nose, with a light that runs down to the tip and 
then horizontally to the volute. 

6. A shapely, bossy chin sharply lighted, with a level cleft dividing 
it from the lower lip. 

7. The hand is generally small, with tiny cylindrical fingers and a 
thumb that tends to curve outward at the tip. 

8. ‘The drapery wraps the body simply, showing narrow ridges. 


44 


g. The rocks are high at the sides, and worn or sunk in sweeping 
planes to a hollow at the centre. 
10. Sparse, delicate vegetation saves it from looking an utter waste. 
11. The trees have short and heavy trunks and have light-colored 
leaves — sometimes star-shaped — against the general dark mass 
of the foliage. 
12. The spirit throughout is gentle and lyrical. 

If these details now are felt in the less communicable context in 
which they lie imbedded, they will release a specific effect to be found 
in a small number of other paintings. Of such I have thus far been 
able to identify only two. 

The first is in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin, measuring 
about 7/2 x 143-5 inches and represents the Pieta (Fig. 2). The 
theme would lead one to expect more acute emotion, but the painter, 
true to his temperament, has conceived the scene at the same pitch of 
intensity as the representation of the Swooning Virgin. There is the 
same pathos in the figures, the Virgin’s forces being all but spent be- 
fore they entirely leave her. 

Unhappily this panel has undergone considerable wear and mutila- 
tion, so that its characteristics will not appear as clearly as in the pic- 
ture. Nevertheless, if the two pictures are compared in respect to the 
particulars enumerated above, it will readily become evident that their 
originis the same. Their kind of plasticity, their types and their gentle 
pathos, their color and texture, could only be present in two works by 
the same hand. Although the rocks in both worn into sweeping planes, 
are similarly disposed and have the same formation, the resemblances 
of the figures are more striking and decisive. Thus the Evangelist in 
both shows a feature-for-feature analogy, even to the arrangement of 
his draperies, and if the St. Joseph in the Berlin Pieta had not lost 
his halo by scraping, the contour would outline a head identical with 
that of the St. Joseph in the Copenhagen panel; and if the surface 
were not worn, the chiaroscuro would model the same mould, the same 
skull, the same depression at the temple, the same cheek and nose, in 
both. The wringing of the hands in both figures shows the same folded 
fingers, and the thumbs are tipped outward.” One might carefully 
compare each detail to fortify the total impression. 

The other panel is in the Lehman Collection in New York (Fig. 3), 
and represents the Nativity.’ It joins the other two, discussed above, 
by the same unmistakable signs. The scene has a mood of divine fa- 
miliarity and both the Virgin and the Joseph have the air of high 


45 


station. Here she appears in a light-colored mantle, with delicately 
fashioned features, and the nose shaped as in the two other panels; 
also, she has the same thumb. Her eye has the same look, and this is 
rendered by the same means. The Joseph is less grave, but his features 
and his fingers have the same shape as in the Copenhagen and Berlin 
panel. The rocks slope from both sides towards the centre with the 
same curve, and the trees rise on short trunks with the same abundant 
spread of dark foliage showing the star-shaped leaves we already saw 
in the Copenhagen panel. The ground vegetation has in this, as in the 
Lehman panel, the character of a note rapidly jotted down, one might 
almost say, written with the brush. 

These affinities constitute the only cummunicable means of express- 
ing the identity of an authorship that reaches one by the irrational 
channels of intuition. And if the recurrence in all of these panels of 
certain features may be trusted, the close resemblance among them 
would tend to make these compositions, even if their dimensions do 
not exactly match, the scattered parts of the same original predella. 

In all the three panels the halos are tooled and stamped identically 
with discs against a pricked ground, tiny discs edging the great circle. 
The lesser circles dividing the different fields are the same in num- 
ber throughout. Then, the borders of the drapery consist of a broad 
and narrow stripe, running together along the edge. The closely ap- 
proximate dimensions, the halos and the borders, are the three obvious 
—if by no means conclusive — grounds for believing the panels dis- 
cussed to belong to a single work. Whether this be so or not, there is a 
great deal beside contemporaneity in the style to persuade one that the 
single authorship of the panels is indisputable. 

Who their painter was, is, for the present, hard to determine. Known 
only in these three fragments, it is hard to represent to oneself the ar- 
tistic personality of their master and his range. His chronological 
place and larger affinities are more easily determined. While his gen- 
eral traits force him into Florence, and into the middle of the fourteenth 
century, its more intimate “betrayals” confine him within Bernardo 
Daddi’s immediate circle. 

His type in fact is built upon Daddi’s models (Fig. 4), a type that 
calls into being a world of associations, of suggestions so diverse from 
the worlds of other artistic groups, and so peculiar to itself, that we 
know it at once as we know the face of a friend. In our painter’s fig- 
ures we touch the life, the humanity, the social intimations with which 
Daddi’s people are instinct. But as we come nearer to it, as we sink 


46 


ourselves in its atmosphere, we become aware of a gentler mood in a 
spirit of a less vivid mobility, and a more developed gift of pathos. 

But if this painter is distinguishable from Daddi he, nevertheless, 
certainly derived from him, and Daddi’s tradition is at the root of the 
very particulars that separate the two masters. 

Thus the general shape of the heads, the daintiness of the features, 
the length and smoothness of the cheek, the way the muscles draw in 
at the corners of the mouth, the shape of the lips, affirm the kinship of 
the two masters. 

These details, then, in both, found in the artistic environment in 
which one finds them, urge the conclusion that our painter was formed 
by Daddi. But another influence less essential, yet still an influence, 
passes between us and the three predella pieces. And that is the in- 
fluence of another, probably an older pupil of Daddi, Andrea Orcagna. 

Such an influence may elude the perfunctory glance; it lies at the 
basis of our painter’s architectural sense, however. The structure of 
the individual figure rises in a general inclusive contour to heavy 
shoulders imparting a squareness and solidity to the total mass not 
often present in Daddi. Both the individual and general mass are to be 
found in the predella of Orcagna’s polyptych (Fig. 5) in S. Maria 
Novella in Florence, where — and particularly in the Mourning of a 
King (Fig. 6) — we shall find a similar composition and feeling. Our 
painter borrowed the upper part of the Virgin’s figure in the Lehman 
Nativity from an angel in the polyptych mentioned (Fig. 7). 

But our painter seems to have absorbed other, more external de- 
tails from Orcagna. Thus the placing, drawing and setting of the eye, 
carry us as forcibly to the same predella, and on closer scrutiny, the 
double stripe we noted in the three compositions will be found here, 
and because it very seldom occurs outside Orcagna’s circle at this 
period, there is high likelihood it was appropriated from that source. 

Beyond this the internal evidence of the three panels will not take 
us. One would have to pervert it if one insisted on being more precise 
in placing them. Nor is there anything in documentary or historical 
literature to throw any light on them. It is more than likely that other 
works of his are extant, and somewhere, between the covers of a book 
or in hidden archives, he is cited as one of the glories of ‘Trecento art or 
the recognized master of specific paintings. But until such informa- 
tion links itself conclusively to these three predella pieces, they will 
have to be regarded simply as the exquisite products of a highly gifted 
follower of Daddi, influenced by Orcagna. 


47 


i 
‘ 


A feature to be found in Bernardo Daddi: 


an 


gretto Nuzi. 


photograph No. 38176. — 


r 
Ali ° 


I. 
Ze 


in 


hed 


is 


Publ 


3. 


ee 


20448 


) % 


"gS ‘pedoy 
> VNOVOUC) 


2IUI40] J *D]]920N D1dD 


¢ io) a 


HOALdUAIOg 10 STIVLAC] 


Peer er 


MN £AAd ddd ddd. 


grt 


PYLLLL 


Fic. 7. Orcacna: ANGEL Fic. 6. Orcacna: Derarit or PrepELta To PotyprycHu 


FROM PoLypTycH Strozzi Chapel, Sta. Maria Novella, Florence 
Strozzi Chapel, Sta. Maria Novella, Florence 


2 3 Se eee 


Fic. 7. Tue Focc Museum Prieta 
The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. 


THE MASTER OF THE FOGG PIETA* 


VU ee the evils of attribution and particularly its abuses 
by one side, the alarms on the other, with all its real and fancied 
difficulties, and the somewhat fatuous objections it raises in certain 
circles, its absence would be a deplorable sign of indifference. And to- 
day the pictures that still remain without a settled designation, even 
those among them of considerable merit, are accorded a very limited 
attention. by 

Besides, the most Rousseauistic aesthete cannot help putting the 
question of identity to himself. The more individualized one’s pleas- 
ure in a picture, the more will it seek to resolve itself into terms that 
are mentally more seizable than the fugitive aesthetic experience. 
These terms will differentiate it from all other adventures of its type 
and furnish a name to the differentiation. An attribution is a dif- 
ferentiation of aesthetic experience. And this baptismal habit has also 
its practical uses in making a work thus classified an object of general 
currency. 

The fact that a number of interesting pictures by the single master 
herein dealt with, are still variously named or unidentified, has de- 
prived them of a certain force of authority they regain in a consolidated 
body. Such is the case of a Crucifix (Fig. 1) in the Church of S. Croce in 
Florence. That this Crucifix—which now hangs in the sacristy” in its 
darkest corner, high up on the wall — has not, however, remained alto- 
gether neglected, is proved by its mention in modern critical literature. 
Adolfo Venturi’ (V, 492) attributes it to the School of Giotto—where it 
undeniably belongs by its shape and by an artistic tradition that organ- 
ized the parts of the figure in a solid form, primarily functioning as an 
integral member of the compositional structure. But if Giottesque in 
its tradition, certain external features in this Crucifix disguise a de- 
pendence on Giotto as evident as that of other contemporary F'loren- 
tine Crosses. On the other hand — so deep did this tradition run — 
our Crucifix looks forward towards, and anticipates, the greater Andrea 
del Castagno, who likes similarly to dwell on the raw bulk of the figure 
and on its bluntness of feature, and place it in a cognate psychological 


ambient. 
If it wants in that synthesis which ties our faculties in instant re- 


49 


sponse, if its realism stops where it begins, it declares nevertheless a 
vigorous personality, who expresses himself without hesitation and with- 
out confusion. 

A small number of pictures by him, extended over a lifetime of 
activity, is more likely on first sight, to throw into prominence their 
outward disparities than their radical unity. Accordingly, even the 
painting that suggests the closest proximity of period to the S. Croce 
Crucifix, an altarpiece in the Collegiata at Figline (Fig. 14), defies at 
first blush, by its incidental variations, all evidences of common origin. 
The difference in subject is alone enough to obscure them. Unlike the 
Crucifix, which represents a definite interval following the tragedy, the 
altarpiece is without time and without action. 

Ruin and restoration disfigure at least half of the surface, and 
the photograph here reproduced renders inadequate testimony of its 
actual appearance. Moreover the form, the movement, are gentler in 
effect, and the pantomime appropriately relaxes. The even mood is 
broken only by the restlessness of the burly bear-like Infant. His 
head and that of the angel at His left, however, at once offer a haunting 
resemblance to St. John, in the Crucifix (Fig. 2), in something that, 
under all the varying external manifestations, seems to spring from a 
common temperament, and follows a common orbit of consciousness. 
The mask is thrown over the same bony frame, and shows the same 
rises and depressions. The hair has the same tendency to curl at the 
ends. The lids have the same heavy outlines that hold a similar glance 
between them. The fingers, which part at the roots and curve together 
at the tips, reappear in the left hands of Christ and Mary; the drapery, 
which in both paintings tends to fall into broad planes of light, sinks 
to narrow folds. ‘These similarities of shape become the more signifi- 
cant by leading us to ultimate types that distinguish themselves sharply 
from all other contemporary painting. 

To these two pictures may be joined two panels, which by sharing 
their analogies, will serve to improve the credit of the above demonstra- 
tion. They are at the Museum of Fine Arts in Worcester, and repre- 
sent St. Francis (Fig. 3) and St. Philip* (Fig. 4). 

In spite of the pre-exhibitional rite of cleaning and furbishing these 
panels are still in a tolerably presentable condition. Of the two, the 
St. Francis affords features of close, clear and convincing analogy 
to the St. Louis in the altarpiece. The hanging cowl stretches the 
horizontal folds in the front into the same pattern. The chiaroscuro 
that lights large surfaces of the drapery, which slip into dark narrow 


50 


grooves, functions similarly in both figures ; and following the master’s 
usual practice, a dark heavy contour edges the stuff which falls into 
long, straight folds. If the hands of the St. Francis seem a trifle 
more structural and obedient to their function, the right of St. Philip 
with its long thumb — flat and boneless in its body and knotted at the 
root — is paralleled in the uppermost angel at the right of the Figline 
altarpiece. An ear, in which the cavity is differentiated into a larger 
and a smaller, is common to both. The eye of St. Francis varies from 
that of St. Louis only by being deeply set. It glides between sharp and 
stiffly curved edges of two lids that look as if they were cut in ivory. 
Its analogy to the eye of the St. John of the S. Croce Crucifix amounts 
to identify. It dips downward similarly at the inner corner, where the 
more sinuous curve of the lower lid meets it in a point. The same eye 
recurs in the Crucifix at Croce, where the lids join the face in a line 
that marks their springing. 

But the affinities extend further to the shadows around the inner 
extremity of the eye, and if the Francis does not, the Philip does, show 
the flesh-fold under the brow, that runs horizontally until it strikes the 
upright wall of the nose. In both the St. Francis, and the Evangelist 
of the Crucifix, the skin contracts over the hard shell of the forehead in 
a way characteristic of our master. 

These demonstrations throw up peculiarities of habit, of vision and 
of statement, that distinguish still another panel, a fragment of a Cru- 
cifix (Fig. 5), a lamenting Mother of Christ in the collection of Mr. F. 
Mason Perkins in Lastra a Signa, near Florence. 

The solid enamel noticeable chiefly in the quatrefoils of the S. 
Croce Crucifix, the skin moving over the large bony framework of the 
face, as an expressional agent, at once assimilate this work into the 
group here brought together. The surface has undergone changes, 
chiefly at the hands of time, so different from that of the Crucifix that 
at first glance its superficial disparities will seem essential. The nose 
has the usual bluntness, the lips an animal insensibility, and they 
are drawn upwards at the corners into a grimace that apes that of the 
Virgin of S. Croce. Although Mr. Perkins’ figure avoids the rusticity 
of type of the latter, the eyes and the muscles around them function in 
accordance with the same formula of expression, differing by being 
narrower in the former. They are similarly shaped with the same fold 
made by the contraction, that leaves a characteristic triangular hollow 
between the eye and the nose. The haggard look in Mr. Perkins’ figure, 
produced by pushing very nearly half of the iris under the lower lid, re- 


51 


sembles in tendency, if not in effect, the eyes of the St. Francis in 
Worcester. The contours that schematize the shapes with a vehement 
directness, suggest the course and accent of the same strong hand. 

In the Musée Archeologique at Rennes hangs a figure’ in three- 
quarter to full-length of a King David (Fig. 6), which so persistently 
discloses the same peculiarities, and to so close a scrutiny, that it forces 
itself into the same group. What still remains visible, does so in spite 
of a crackle that has cut deep and wide into the surface, but the web it 
has woven over it has the same quadrilateral units as other panels of 
this group. 

The David confronts us with features repeatedly met with in these 
panels — features that declare themselves in the same planes, defined 
by the same heavy contour as the Evangelist at S. Croce, and the 
master’s peculiarities in the shaping of the eye and in its setting, recur 
in both these heads in detailed agreement, as they anticipate the 
lateral figures in the panel that follows. 

All the tendencies that the works thus far assembled persistently 
bring into relief, converge in the Fogg Pieta (Fig. 7). If no definite 
name has hitherto been attached to it, this sublime little panel has 
nevertheless attracted considerable attention. And by the same psy- 
chological law of which I speak at the outset, it has offered a challange 
to the deep-rooted baptismal weakness of even those of us, who fancy 
the preoccupation it involves stifles one’s joy in the object. It has 
drawn guesses from the more adventurous. But all the enterprise has 
been sicklied o’er with a cautious vagueness, and although it is labelled 
as of the Italian School, I believe the most definite opinion of its origin 
swings between Verona and Southern France. That it is Giottesque, 
however, and Florentine, will appear from its affinity to a number of 
Florentine works, with which it would logically share its local origin 
and school. 

The total design, the pose, the bodily suggestions, the drawing of, 
let us say, the central figure, may seem on first view un-Florentine, 
and the arrangement of the holy women above the Christ,° and the 
absence of figures in front of Him, or of the usual desperate claspings, 
like the pose and position of the swooning Virgin, are difficult to paral- 
lel, and not in the area to which I assign the picture alone, but in all of 
Italy. 

Nevertheless, these deviations from the rule are not obstacles to 
my conclusion, however misleading they may initially be; they are 
motifs that are imitable, and accordingly not essential to the style. 


52 


This is profoundly Florentine and as radically Giottesque, primarily for 
the following reasons: 


that the squareness of the total mass in a single compositional 
plane produces the Giottesque sense of total weight and architec- 
tual cohesion of parts; 


that the relation of the total mass to the area is such as to throw 
the physical presence of the figures and their action into relief; 


that, as in Giotto and his school, there is a plastic isolation of the 
individual shapes within the compositional tension ; 


that the representation resolves itself into primary action and 
secondary action, and by methods singularly Giottesque. The 
primary action is contained within the converging diagonals of 
the central pyramid, the secondary action may be said to be at 
one dramatic moment’s remove from the more direct emotional 
response at the centre, and is represented by the two erect lateral 
figures, who steady the composition by their solidity and verti- 
cality.’ 


The two protagonists, the swooning Virgin and the dead Christ, are 
thrown on a prominent diagonal that cuts the composition in two. 
This diagonal descends historically from a similar line in Giotto’s 
Pieta at the Arena Chapel, that carries the same function, directing the 
gravitation of attention upon Christ’s head. 

In the works so far assembled the artistic personality is determined 
and differentiated by a certain eccentric energy in the statement and 
shape. The heavy mould is outlined by the cut of an emphatic con- 
tour, and a graduated light that renders the flexibility of the flesh. The 
same mould, the same decisive line, the same chiaroscuro, reappear in 
the Fogg Pieta. But if these analogies are general and do not suggest 
their significance at once, their radical importance will proclaim itself 
in a confrontation of details. 

Throughout, the edges of the lids run in curves that meet in a point 
at the inner corners, and the lids tending to detach themselves in sharp 
definition, show the line of juncture with the face. The jaws are wide, 
the nose blunt, the lips firm and hard like rubber. The mechanism 
of the facial muscles elaborates the character of the bony structure by 


me 


its expressional mobility. The drapery has the same texture, only a 
slightly lighter weight than that in previously discussed works. The 
hands are short, and show the bone and the articulations under the 
flesh. 

Turning to individual figures and allowing for discrepancies of scale 
and of condition, the holy woman at the left has a head which differs 
from that of the Virgin in the S. Croce Crucifix (Fig. 8) by being 
squarer. Its mould, however, is the same, and the mantle is similarly 
draped over both. The mouth and eyes are distorted into a grimace 
betraying the same feeling, the stress of which draws the brows of the 
Fogg figure into a curved line, like that in the Evangelist of the S. Croce 
Crucifix; and the lids converge in a sharp point at the inner corner 
exactly as in that figure. Both show the flesh-fold over the eye that 
runs toward the same blunt nose. What is true of the holy woman at 
the left, is true of the variations upon Her type, the swooning Virgin 
and the Magdalen in the same panel. 

The hands of the Crucifix again, are repeated in the Fogg panel. 
Thus the fingers in the left hand of the Virgin in the latter are curved 
like those of the Virgin in the Crucifix; the left of the Magdalen in the 
Fogg panel has the shape and mechanism of the right of the Virgin, 
and the right of the St. Francis in the Crucifix, while the close-fingered 
hands of Christ and Joseph of Arimathea reveal the same shape and 
structure as those in the quatrefoils of the Crucifix. 

The hair in the Fogg panel exhibits further analogies to the Cruci- 
fix. Itis of a firm and fine fibre with a living movement in it. That of 
the kneeling St. John is as diverse from that of his contemporaries as 
it is similar to the curled hair of Christ and John in the Crucifix, only 
that in the larger painting it bends with the ductility of wire. 

The dead Christ’s head has the mould of the St. Francis at Worces- 
ter, and the scalp of the St. Philip. The modulation of line and surface 
reveal the same bulges in the three, and the same sparse fleecy beard 
fringes their jaws. The hair of the St. Philip grows thinly and is 
brushed forward as in the Fogg Museum Christ. 

But however limited the revelation of these analogies may be, the 
Christ in the Fogg picture, by repeating the figure of the Crucified 
(Fig. 9) at S. Croce, furnishes a final proof of their common author- 
ship. 

The head of the former, hanging like the pitying head of John in 
the Crucifix, has a mute pathos worn into the hollows of the face; a 
face more delicately nuanced in the smaller figure, and subtler in its 


54 


tragic suggestions than the heroic head of the Crucifix. But the dif- 
ferences are those of motif, of conception, and not of type nor of style, 
differences fittingly incidental in each case to the discrepancy of scale. 
If one imagines the head of the smaller Christ more broadly formed, it 
will assume the look of the larger. The eyes are the same, the lids be- 
ing cut and attached identically, with a crescent-shaped gap between 
them, that swerves downward at the inner corner. These two instances 
of death, showing the sightless eyeball behind the parted lids, isolate 
themselves from all other representations of the dead Christ in the 
Florence of the time. The foreshortened lips are perhaps closer to 
those in Mr. Perkins’ fragment than to any other of this master’s 
works. But if the two heads, serving somewhat different expressive 
ends, are variations of the same ultimate type, the bodies being less 
expressive agents, are nearer their original formula. 

The torsos, showing the worn flesh over the fragile framework of the 
ribs, and a delicate slimness alike in both, are bounded by a contour 
that searches and accentuates the same undulations in the shape. In 
both, physical suffering has pulled the flesh over the prominent ilium 
and sunk it into hollows below the abdomen. The loin-cloth of the S. 
Croce Crucified suggests in the arrangement of vertical and diagonal 
folds, and in its silhouette, the drapery of St. Joseph in the Fogg panel. 
The shaping of the right leg of the Christ in the last named picture, 
with the flat knee and the downward tapering tibia below it, the pro- 
jecting ankles, constitute the prominent features of the original image 
which served our painter in both cases. 

All these panels join, by the analogies that have been pointed out, 
in a single artistic personality. But they also express a common tra- 
dition and a common period. The formative influence of their master, 
it must be admitted, cannot be as easily ascertained, possibly because 
of the idiosyncracies of a genius which, wanting in supreme characters, 
was nevertheless as original as any in Florence. It is a type of genius, 
that sacrifices the sublime or the exquisite qualities of the greatest ex- 
pression for qualities so vigorous and so individual, that they require an 
appraisal by standards of their own. Accordingly, if he has undergone 
a deserved neglect beside his most illustrious contemporaries, his in- 
tegrated oeuvre now makes a claim to high rank. 

His representations win their special significance by relieving the 
impelling energy in action above general suggestions of ultimate reality 
or ultimate mystery. He absorbs you by his passion, which is always 
allowed to wholly possess his figures — suggesting that aspect of human 


55 


life in which impulse works slowly, but with the certainty of instinct 
and the directness of fate. There is accordingly a kind of primitive 
force in his types. 

His modelling is not merely the abstract Giottesque medium for 
rendering the material existence of the figure, but a means also of phys- 
ical and mental description: power in the mass, nuance in the details 
— nuance that renders the fading of natural energies more often than 
the refinement of thought or feeling. He is the only painter of the early 
Florentine Trecento who endows the flesh that covers the face with its 
proper character, consistency and its peculiar capacity for registering 
certain kinds of inner movement. 

By his form, by his use of chiaroscuro, our painter sets himself 
apart from the body of his Florentine contemporaries. His mass, his 
composition, his types, however, are of the Giottesque succession; his 
density and emphatic statement profess affinities with Maso’s frescoes 
in the Bardi Chapel at S. Croce in Florence, while his types recall the 
earlier Master of the St. Nicholas Chapel in the Lower Church in Assisi 
_ and the Giottesque Crucifix at Ognissanti. 

It is probably in his more advanced maturity that he appropriates 
certain details from Orcagna (see the Child at Figline), or from Nardo 
(the eyes of the Worcester St. Francis). The Romanizing features 
otherwise absent from the Florentine painting of the time, of fore- 
shortened palms in the S. Croce Crucifix, in the Figline altarpiece, of 
Christ’s attitude in the Fogg Museum panel, point to an early part of 
the T'recento, when Roman influence was accessible to the Florentine 
Giotteschi in Florence, as well as in Assisi. 

But, as has already been remarked, our master’s composite mental 
picture harks back to Giotto, and certain Giottesque traits urge a 
straight derivation from him, and even actual contact with him. His 
radical type of face repeats the plan of such heads as those of the upper 
figures in Giotto’s altarpiece at the Uffizi (Fig. 10), where the features 
are similarly laid out. One will find the same snouty large noses, and 
the same eyes, only they are less schematically and emphatically con- 
toured, with the fold over the lid forming the pocket so common in our 
master. The hair in the S. Croce Crucifix again formalizes the fine hair 
of the Uffizi panel. 

All these considerations enforce the conclusion that our painter 
worked in Florence under Giotto’s influence from about 1320 onwards, 
an influence which single at the outset, gave way to a growing eclecti- 
cism. 


56 


NOTES 


1. The reconstruction of this master first appeared in Arr 1n America for June, 1926, 160-176. 


2. Crowe and Cavalcaselle (Ed. Hutton, London, 1908, I, 155) identifies this Crucifix, which in the 
seventies of the last century graced the vestibule common to the sacristy and the Medici Chapel, 
with one to which Vasari attributes the glorious réle of a gift to Farinata degli Uberti for prevent- 
ing the destruction of Florence in 1260, from Margaritone, its painter. Vasari (I, 361, 362) saw 
it hanging three centuries later between the Peruzzi and Giugni Chapels. Milanesi, writing in 
1878 (in his notes to Vasari, I, 362, n. 1), questions this identification. And one might properly 
ask whether Vasari, who describes the Margaritone Crucifix as “dipinto alla greca,” would have 
confused the Byzantinizing style of the middle Dugento, which he distinguished in other instances 
from that of the succeeding century, with the fourteenth-century subject of this discussion. He 
was doubtless referring to another one, very likely of Margaritone’s generation, whether by him or 
not. In the guide-books and among the simple local tradition it still goes by the name of the 
Aretine master. Maud Cruttwell (Flor. Churches, London Ed., Dent, 1908, 92) says it was 
removed to the sacristy in 1839. 


3. See also Sirén, Giottino (Leipzig, 1908), 94, where the author tentatively attributes the Crucifix 
to Antonio Veneziano. 


4. They hang under the name of Taddeo di Bartolo. her Te Feared Seles 1g rq 


5. It is labelled “Ecole Italienne”; and has recently been privately attributed to Lorenzo d’Ales- 
sandro! 


6. The position of Christ may be explained by Roman precedent such as the Christ in the fresco of 
the same subject in the Upper Church of St. Francis in Assisi. 


7. Parallels may be found everywhere in Giotto but the closest are in the Pieta and Visitation in 
the Arena Chapel; in the Obsequies of St. Francis and the Assumption of the Evangelist at 
S. Croce. 


oe 


Detarts From THE ParntTinGs oF THE MASTER OF THE Foce Pietra 


. Cambridge (U. S. A.), Fogg Art Museum, The Pieta. 
Fiorence, S. Croce, Crucifix. 

Worcester, Mass., Art Museum, St. Francis. 

Figline, Duomo, Altar piece. 

Florence, S. Croce, Crucifix. 


M~I Oy 


maPwhr = 


Figline, Duomo, Altarpiece. 
Florence, S. Crote, Crucifix. 
Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, The Pieta. 
Florence, S. Croce, Crucifix. 
Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, The Pieta. 


= ‘ 


Fic. 6. MaAsrer or THe Foce Prera: Kine Davin Fic. 1. Master or THE Focc PirerA: Crucirix Fic. 5. Master oF THE Focc Pietra: Mourninc 


Museum, Rennes Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Vircin. (FRAGMENT oF A CruCIFIX) 
Collection of Mr. F. Mason Perkins, Florence 


ie 


PVs a is el een igs 


Sr. Puitip 


MaAsTER OF THE Focc PieTA 


4. 


. 


Fic 


FRANCIS 


2 Sai 


Master OF THE Foce PirtA 


3. 


Fic 


ass, 


M 


> 


Museum, Worcester 


Worcester Art 


The 


Fic. 8. Master or THE Foce PrerA: Detar. or Fic. 9. Master or THE Focc PrerA: Derait oF THE CRUCIFIED Fic. 2. Master or THE Focc Pietra: Derait oF 
VIRGIN ON THE CRUCIFIX ON THE CRUCIFIX Sr. Joun, THE EvANGELIST, ON THE CRUCIFIX 


Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence 


Fic. 10. Grorro: Detait or ALTARPIECE 


Uffizi Gallery, Florence 


B 
# 
/ 
i 


Tate tien 


NNA, SAINTS AND ANGELS 


Mapo 


Duomo, Figline 


A 


Master oF THE Foce Pier 


Fic. 14. 


or 


> } ae os a 
= el 


| “ ) 


me. 
o-4 


~~ 


a, 
tr: 


ay 


igi iee oe ie a 
piled in oes ih Phi it Pt 


aa eR 


es ae *. 


a. ; 


gr ® ae 


en ee set EF 


EPA SOWN PAINTINGS BY TADDEO GADDI' 


# peel of the Virgin and Child, w Teddeo Gaddi (Fie. . ‘ 
v. agit, but happily unrestored, ds anaye, beariag only eye ae bes 
iim that jewel-offerings and corumels heve left on it, » ve - “te, wwe 


: inet Florence, in the kittie church of S. Lowenzo 42 Seance 
Csding com ienepy evr hues been ote haded 
es is a [ea . ure é the 
a - ¥ 4 : « = j if ES | ee 
ie wi) oS =: met atts which | 
imok mas 
, a so apr é wap ve beoed] 3 wpse 
2 
| ieee ieee ts et wears uated Sagers — shaper «nid 


ie IW get sateals with bas said mank: 


Q qharacter (which 
fete det and dots and 
vorpical bale? 
a which the sadly repainted lunette at the Floren- 
ie & # variant, ts doubtless the surviving central pane! of a 
+ 0) Neroe-quarter length figures within ctsped and pointed 
dis e of which occurs again in some of Taddeo’s earlier 
m nag upper tiers of the Pistoia polyptych. The panel has 
pees tromcated. The tone and the individual colors, 
a ohne ee tame, te tove of the drapery over Pls legs, the 
i <2 Ring. «te sack as ome night hove found in the ssi 
: on re 3} cow um the Academy in Ploreace, hed they 
+ preserve ther ongrea! unearanhes inmxence.” 
Titian suit oxen naliacted then Felee’s wuenl grove on 
, aed the benevolentiy inclined bead her « freeier, more 
+s with a gleam of something in it Hie self-cecommendation. 
y em in conjunction with the treadth, the lengety writen 


“4 


TWO UNKNOWN PAINTINGS BY TADDEO GADDI 


HERE is a panel of the Virgin and Child, by Taddeo Gaddi (Fig. 


ft 


1), showing slight, but happily unrestored, damage, bearing only ~"** ; 


alle Rose.’ It seems, notwithstanding, never to have been included in 
any of the published accounts of this master, and yet no student of the 
Trecento should hesitate to attribute it to him on sight.’ For in it we 
find almost every one of Taddeo’s customary forms, and traits which 
recur most persistently in both his early and late works :* the slack and 
lazy line, the long straight grooves in the drapery, the broad, loose 
hatching, the blunt lineaments, the unarticulated fingers — shapes and 
habits of execution everywhere stamped with his unmistakable peculi- 
arities. Here also appear the same border, barbaric in character (which 
occurs passim among his works), of the S ornament and dots and 
crosses ; and his typical halo.’ 

Our Madonna, of which the sadly repainted lunette at the Floren- 
tine Academy is a variant, is doubtless the surviving central panel of a 
polyptych of three-quarter length figures within cusped and pointed 
arches, the shape of which occurs again in some of Taddeo’s earlier 
panels, and in the upper tiers of the Pistoia polyptych. The panel has 
for some reason been truncated. The tone and the individual colors, 
the yellow of Christ’s tunic, the rose of the drapery over His legs, the 
orange-red of its lining, are such as one might have found in the small 
press panels (see Fig. 2) now in the Academy in Florence, had they 
been allowed to preserve their original unvarnished innocence.’ 

It is less sullen and more collected than Taddeo’s usual grave and 
shy Virgins, and the benevolently inclined head has a fresher, more 
trusting eye, with a gleam of something in it like self-recommendation. 
Its temper taken in conjunction with the breadth, the largely written 
design, the désinvolture would aprioristically put it among his later 
works. I say aprioristically, if indeed the variations of creative habit 
which operates at a deeper level of consciousness than those of its 
movements that are responsible for specific changes — lead an artist 
from abstraction towards naturalism, towards a greater general com- 
mand, a greater fluency and amplitude of expression. 


59 


° ° . . . x fur id 
the pious profanation that jewel-offerings and coronals have left on it, Ma enna tn te Mu 


within a few kilometres of Florence, in the little church of S. Lorenzo a& 


S 
fa ka 
PARVO f. 


And in searching through Taddeo’s works for affinities with our 
Virgin, we discover them more numerous and more profound towards 
the end of his activity than at its beginnings. Taddeo is essentially a 
fresco painter (see Fig. 3), overweeningly amplifying the Giottesque 
conventions ; his evolution amounting to a relaxation of the plastic bulk 
which, so long as he remained under Giotto’s influence, was in appre- 
ciable measure also a positive plastic value; but as he retreated from it, 
his manner drifted along with the collective tendency of the age to- 
wards literary expressivism. And of this age it may further be said, 
that the sense of seeing so strong in earlier artists was growing feebler, 
than the sense of sentiment or situation. This general movement in 
Taddeo’s evolution forces our Virgin into a period wherein the disinte- 
gration of the plastic consistency had reached an advanced stage, but 
also when the artist had arrived at a mastery within his proper limita- 
tions. 

On narrow confrontation with other of his panels, our Virgin falls 
definitely among those that group themselves about the fully authenti- 
cated altarpiece dated 1355 now hanging in the Uffizi (Fig. 4), the an- 
cona in S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas, Pistoia,’ and the polyptych in the 
sacristy of S. Felicita in Florence (see S.P.5). — 

It is true, the silhouette of the Virgin’s head, the arrangement of the 
- mantle over it, the shallow fluting of the lining, the types; the pose, 
the pantomime and the draperies of the Child in the altarpiece at S. 
Martino a Mensola establish an undeniable stylistic affinity with our 
picture, but because the surface of the former is notably harder, the 
treatment more formal, more timid, while ours is freer throughout, and 
exhibits, anthropologically speaking, more highly evolved types, this 
relation no more than fixes a zone of reasonable chronological limit for 
the S. Lorenzo Virgin. Beyond it lies the region of the Baroncelli 
frescoes’ (1332-1338), and of the Berlin triptych, dated 1334.” 

If the relative lateness of our picture remains at this point unestab- 
lished, the small evidence in its favor might be confirmed by analogies 
to a work by Bernardo Daddi. But it would, first, on general presump- 
tions, be natural to wonder whether the emphasis upon the glance of 
the eyes, uncommonly large for Taddeo, may not owe its intention to 
the influence of a master, who at least once before (in the case of the 
Berlin tabernacle of 1334) seems to have won Taddeo to direct imita- 
tion. But whether this analogy be fancied or not, the likelihood of its 
actuality increases, when we compare our Virgin with Daddi’s altar- 
piece in Or S. Michele,” where over and above the identity of general 


60 


arrangement, the motive of the Child, corresponds — with a departure 
only in the upper part of His figure and in His right arm — to ours. 
Could the likelihood of a dependence of our Virgin on Daddi’s be sub- 
stantiated, it would fix as the earliest possible date for its painting the 
year 1347, when payments were made to Daddi for the altarpiece just 
mentioned.” 

But for decisive affinities to the S. Lorenzo panel we must go to 
Taddeo’s S. Felicita (see S. P. 5) and to the Uffizi Virgins ; though it is 
with the former that the nature of the resemblance is more significant. 
In both the rhythmic principle in the disposition of masses, in the pro- 
portions, drawn out beyond his custom, is the same, and in both there is 
a similar curving sweep of general directions, and the same awkward and 
impassive drawing. He has sought the same kind of grace in the long 
hands, which are by so much more closely related as they exhibit fun- 
damental discrepancies from the short square rude ones of earlier 
works. His mode again of rounding the cheek cylindrically, but also 
externally, so that it amounts to a mere curving of the surface, the 
mould of the head, its poise, the shape and speculation of the eye (see 
also S. P. 4), in both pictures, the hair drawn diagonally over the tem- 
ples, the fall of the drapery, the central position of Christ’s right hand, 
record the same habits of construction, and phases of taste at approxi- 
mately the same stage of evolution. 

If we may judge by the signs the Uffizi panel of 1355, in its present 
state, gives of itself, its analogies to our Virgin are only less close than 
those just reviewed, though on mere dialectic grounds their relation 
may be considered as strengthened by the evident narrow stylistic corre- 
spondence between the former of these and the Felicita polyptych. But 
in estimating, with what scrupulous looseness soever, the chronological 
interval between them, we should have to remember T'addeo’s general 
pace of evolution, and of his later evolution in particular. Aware of 
the perils of hypothetical dating in the precise terms of arbitrary, prac- 
tical units of time, I should prefer to place it between the S. Martino 
and the S. Felicita pictures or —in slightly variant form — between 
the 1347 Daddi altarpiece and the 1355 Uffizi Virgin. 

A smaller” panel (Fig. 5) in the collection of Mr. Phillip Gentner, 
representing the apocalyptic St. John, possesses merits above the ma- 
jority of Taddeo’s works. Part of a scattered polyptych similar to 
Taddeo’s altarpiece in S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas in Pistoia,” the St. 
John probably stood in a course like that running over the full-length 
figures in this altarpiece. 


61 


Accepting for the present the attribution to Taddeo™ of a number 
of frescoes and panels without particular distinction, we may well be 
astonished to find such synthesis of artistic expression and such sus- 
tained energy in the action, as in our figure. The firmness of John’s 
mouth, the fixity of his gaze, the heroic pose of the eagle, the energy of 
its taut body and spread wings, obey the same creative impulse that 
has drawn the architectural contours of the figures, the Michelangel- 
esque design, and fixed the unalterable stability of the group in the 
space accorded it within the picture. Taddeo has communicated to 
his figure the sweep, the vision and afflatus of Revelations; and there is 
a good deal in the straight and long glance of John and in the proud 
eagle to testify that both have penetrated vast spaces to carry out the 
divine prophesy in that book. 

So that uniting the force and the swiftness of one to the heavenly 
gift of vision of the other, Taddeo has presented the Evangelist as the 
prophet who sees surely and far with inexorable justice. 

Considered now as the product of a period, this painting implies a 
view of life possible only in an age of settled and constructive convic- 
tions. If we find its like much later in the Sistine Ceiling, the will there 
is already troubled by a sensibility, and by a sense of limitation, too 
great to bear; to find the equal of this figure one would have to go to 
the great masters of the early Quattrocento. 

Typical for Taddeo, the small panel is typical likewise of the evolu- 
tion of Trecento painting in Florence in its absence of depth, of re- 
treating planes; and in the symmetry of the pattern which imitates the 
frontal mode. The color is likewise characteristic of Taddeo. The 
blue of the dress, the rose of the drapery, the yellow of the reverse with 
a green shadow, the brown of the eagle, the vermilion of the book — we 
find them all in the little panels of the Florentine Academy and in the 
Baroncelli Chapel; only that our painting has a freshness not repeated 
in the other of his tempera panels. So single is the radical thought, so 
clear is its rendering, we can see in this picture as in no other by Tad- 
deo, the original vision in the final realization. 

The shapes, the type, the progression of the line, the manner of 
placing the mass, the manual idiosyncracies — everything in it is pe- 
culiar to Taddeo. The head of the Evangelist reappears in the figure 
of the high-priest in the Marriage of the Virgin; in the figure at the 
extreme right in the Presentation of the Virgin; and, with more fu- 
gitive analysis of type, in the isolated figure of St. Joseph, all in the 


62 


Baroncelli Chapel. Only that in the Gentner St. John, the method is 
more concentrated, and the execution tighter. 

But there are in Taddeo’s oeuvre works to which our Saint bears 
even closer kinship, and these are a prophet (S. P. 10, 11) in the vault 
of the crypt at S. Miniato” and the Evangelist in the polyptych (S. P. 
9) at Pistoia. The Gentner and the S. Miniato figures exhibit the same 
rounded contour, the same mould and its rendering in light and shad- 
ow, the coarse ear, the heavy neck and shoulders, the abrupt cut of the 
hair over the ear, the contemptuous protusion of the lower lip, the sul- 
len glance, the slanting eye and the drawn brow. And in these isolated 
features the identical execution is evident, allowing always for the 
difference in medium. 

With this the attribution of Mr. Gentner’s St. John may be consid- 
ered proved. To classify it more narrowly would mean to place it in 
one of 'T'addeo’s periods, and this is perhaps possible by comparing it 
to the Evangelist in the polyptych (S. P. 10, 9) at S. Giovanni Fuori- 
vicitas in Pistoia. The intimate and elusive characteristics which re- 
veal themselves in a comparison of the proportions of the two heads, 
their shape, the modulation of the planes, and the individual features, 
are so close and carry so convincing an authority, as to draw the two 
pictures into chronological proximity. Our St. John would thus date 
from about the middle of the century. 


NOTES 


1. First published in L’Arte, 1921, 116 et seq. 


2. The panel stands on the first altar left as you enter behind a tall canvas, the iconographically 
important portion visible through a rectangular cutting in it. 


3. Carocci’s innocent eye, the only one to have noticed it at all, went so far as to divine its “maniera 
Giottesca” (I Dintorni di Firenze, II, 309); but the latest list of Taddeo’s works in Thieme-Becker 
(1920), XIII, 29, ignores it altogether. 


4. Taddeo Gaddi’s artistic character is settled and tolerably well understood, but it is perhaps be- 
cause he is so easily distinguished, that he has been accorded no close study, and is so often con- 
fused with other painters. The most serious error, which betrays also a shocking want of caution, 
is the persistent attribution to Taddeo of the vault of S. Francesco in Pisa. (See Crowe and 
Cavalcaselle [Ed. Hutton], I, 307-8; Venturi, V, 538; Sirén, I, 269; Thieme-Becker, XII, 29; 
Van Marle, III, 303, 334). Vasari’s (I, 575-6) testimony, confirmed by a letter from Taddeo 
(see La scrittura di artisti Italiani, etc., Florence, 1871), holds probably for the walls and not for 
the vault. This testimony is moreover, vitiated by his mention of subjects as in the vault, which 
are not there. It is more than possible that Vasari slipped into this blunder writing from memory, 
and that the walls originally had frescoes by Taddeo of which nothing is visible today. The 
vault, however, which is of the same time —if not earlier — is unquestionably by a master under 
the combined influence of Simone and Pietro Lorenzetti, conclusively un-Florentine, and very 
likely Pisan. Other seriously misleading attributions are to be found in Sirén, I, 149-151, who 
disturbs the fairly even, by no means perfect, consistency of his reconstruction, by ascribing to 
him a triptych belonging to Mr. Frank L. Babbott in Brooklyn, and an Assumption in the Kaiser- 
Friedrich Museum in Berlin (Sirén, II, Pls. 128, 129), both certainly by the same master, but as 
certainly not by Taddeo. On the other hand Mr. Berenson (Essays in the Study of Sienese 
Painting, New York, 1918, 7, Fig. 3) takes away from Taddeo to give to Daddi the small 
Nativity at Dijon. This was correctly attributed by Sirén in Monatshefte, etc., 1908, 1121. 
Van Marle (III, 317-321), who makes several other unaccountable attributions to Taddeo, follows 
Venturi (V, 531-533) in ascribing to Taddeo the Giottesque Coronation in the Medici Chapel in 
S. Croce. The S, Verdiana Virgin (see Sirén, Monatshefte, 1908, 1121), and the small Virgin 
with saints in Strassburg (Sirén, II, Pl. 131) may no longer be regarded as by Taddeo; being by 
the hand that decorated the chapel in the Castello at Poppi. Of the two panels recently attributed 
to Taddeo, the one published by Van Marle in Arr 1n America, December, 1924, 56, et seq., is 
not by him; the other by Sirén, Burlington Magazine, April, 1926, 185-186, is in a state that robs 
any conclusion of reliability. 

A panel, on the other hand, that might be ascribed to Taddeo, shows a small Madonna with 
Saints, hitherto unpublished, in the collection of Mr. Frank Gould in Maisons-Lafitte (near 
Paris). It resembles the Lehman panel (reproduced in Van Marle, III, 316), but is probably 
somewhat earlier. I owe my first knowledge of it to the kindness of Mr. Berenson. 


5. Repeated with slight difference in the Annunciation at the Museo Bandini, Fiesole, and in the 
altarpiece at S. Martino a Mensola. 


6. The obscure retreat of our picture has spared it from the hideous and barbarous folly of modern 
renovation; its unimpaired, refreshing physical condition, accordingly, makes any conclusive judg- 
ment on the basis of technical comparison with the other less fortunate works, imprudent. 


7. Documented by dated payments of the year 1353. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle (II, 136, 2). As 
this is the final payment we are justified in allowing its stylistic remoteness from the 1355 panel 
to move back the period of its conception, if not of its painting, even before 1350. Reproduced 
Sirén, II, Pl. 133. 


8. Vasari, I, 573, n. 1. See reproductions in Sirén, II, Pls. 116-121. 


64 


9. 
10. 


ETS 


12. 
13. 
14. 
15. 


Reproduced in part in Sirén, II, Pl. 130. 
See reproduction in Sirén, II, Pl. 159. 


It wants the commonest sense of historic actuality to realize the abundance of public- and 
private-paintings in Florence during this period, which, in a limited variety of persisting motives, 
served each successive generation with an accepted and undeniable tradition; and a reasonable 
knowledge of artistic custom to conclude that motives such as this one of Daddi’s picture were 
staring at Taddeo out of any number of frescoes and panels. To take only two likely examples 
of those still extant there is the Virgin on the first floor of the Arte della lana and the Rucellai 
Madonna. It is therefore by no inevitable necessity that our picture is derived from Daddi’s, 
though no other painting known to me is as close to it whether in date or composition. 


M. .495 x .222. 
Sirén, II, Pl. 133. 
See note 4. 


The tradition that Taddeo painted in S. Miniato (see Sacchetti, Novelle, CXXXVI) is con- 
firmed by documents dated 1341-2 published in Frey, Vasari, I, 322. See also Thieme-Becker, 
Kiinstler Lexikon, XIII, 30; and Bollettino d’arte, IX, 237. 


Onkwh = 


Deraits From THE Works oF TAppEo GappI 


Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Madonna and Angels. 
Ruballa (near Florence), S. Giorgio, Cross. 
Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Crucifixion. 
London, Mr. Kerr Lawson, Madonna. 
Florence, S. Felicita, Polyptych. 

Pisa, Camposanto, Story of Job. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Dream of Innocent III. 
Florence, S. Croce, Nativity. 

Pistoia, S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas, Polyptych. 

Worcester, Mass., Mr. Philip Gentner, St. John, the Evangelist. 
Florence, S. Miniato, Prophet. 

Florence, S. Croce, Adoration, 


Fic. 2. Tappeo Gappr: AporATion Fic. 3. Tappeo Gappr: Derait From LEGEND oF Jos 


Academy, Florence Camposanto, Pisa 


a 


AR CoCRtre 


RBA AGE SRS 


np ANGELS 


ADONNA A 


‘N 


i Gallery, 


ApDEO GADDI: 
U 


a" 


Fic. 4. 


Florence 


fhz 


Joun, THE EVANGELIST 


ST 


TappEo GADDI: 


Collection of Mr. Philip 


Fig, 5- 


Mass. 


, 


er 


W orcest 


) 


entner, 


G 


: 78 
2 
: 
' 
- 
, 
: 
‘a z 
} 
—_—_— 
\ 
. 
+ ‘ 
. 
. 
. 
- 
: eh ° 
. 
_ * 
- 
“ 
~.6 


N 


IRGI 


SUMPTION OF THE V 


S 


A 
Tommaso 


TONIO VENEZIANO 


. AN 


6 


Fic. 


Pisa 


’ 


nt of S 


Conve 


THE PANELS OF ANTONIO VENEZIANO’ 


N clearing the areas of Florentine painting of lesser growths to ad- 

mit more light upon the greater flora, I have often happened upon 
works, joined by analogies of style into groups, that would subsequent- 
ly link themselves to some recorded name. Such a linking, however, 
was attended with embarrassment or diffidence, arising in the fact, that 
the personalities these names stand for, have, even in notable instances, 
remained unknown in terms of their painted works, let alone their ar- 
tistic character, which had been inappropriately deduced from the lit- 
erature of art. 

Among a large company of such personalities stands the admirable 
Vasarian figure of Antonio Veneziano, whose oeuvre I was able to ex- 
tend some years back beyond the limits—the only’ limits then ad- 
missible — of his Camposanto frescoes,*® by recognizing his hand in a 
Virgin and Child (Fig. 7) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.’ I 
hoped at the time that it might help to take me from the problem to 
the solution of his origins.” Hanging shyly under the name of Spinello 
Aretino, it led me instead more recently to the distinction of the same 
hand in seven other panels,’ which, while they illuminate his Pisan 
activity, deepen by repeating them, the traces of Antonio’s early in- 
fluences left in the Boston picture. Still another,’ bearing a date and 
a signature, I have refused to accept until the present writing, when 
the first serviceable photographs of it reached me.* These revealed to 
me, beyond any possible doubt, that the painting is by Antonio. 

With this single exception among his extant panels, there is unhap- 
pily no available data bearing on any of them. So that certain kinds 
of stylistic disparities between them are the sole measure of the inter- 
vals between their painting; and even their order may be assumed 
only on grounds of relative and unsubstantiable validity. 

On grounds so qualified, Mr. Richard M. Hurd’s® Coronation 
(Fig.2) would appear to be the earliest: there is an idealism about it 
still strenuously confined within the subjugated forms of a recent ap- 
prenticeship. The shape of the compartment, the cusped moulding, 
are of a retarded fashion, and the staging of the ceremony has retained 
the formula and the solemnity of the Giottesque Coronation at S. Croce, 
painted more than a generation before, with the material difference, 


67 


that here the sorrowful gravity of Christ is dramatically contrasted 
with the demeanor of the meek Virgin. This difference, being also a 
departure from the bulk of contemporary Florentine representation, 
approximates the principle of action to that of Antonio’s Pisan fres- 
coes: dramatization through contrasts. More specific analogies will 
begin to appear if one compare the shape of the face of our Eternal — 
bulging at the top of the forehead, flat from eye to lip, pushed out at 
the chin —to the head of the saint in the Refection of S. Ranieri 
(Fig. 3) at the Camposanto in Pisa; and the shape of the Virgin’s face 
to that of the young monk at the right of the same composition (S. P. 
1). The rude, jointless hands with the oddly attached thumbs in the 
Coronation, reappear in the unserviceable left hands of the same figure 
of S. Ranieri (S. P. 11), and of the frocked youth offering him wine. 

Profoundly Florentine, externally Gaddesque, its crackled enamel 
softens the light over a surface, wherein defacements have been well 
enough disguised. 

On some equally humble occasion, probably during his Pisan so- 
journ, Antonio painted” the Virgin and Angels at Hannover (Fig. 4). 
Here again the Gaddesque formula stares out of an arrangement, 
which, however, lacks the coordination of filled and empty spaces to be 
found in Gaddi. Far from the hallowed hush of the Coronation, the 
lusty angels seem oblivious of their holiness. This change of mood and 
the way it manifests itself, record what a rude genius like Antonio’s took 
from the lyrical Bernardo Daddi, who becomes the tempering influence 
of Antonio’s maturity. One will, nevertheless, continue to find the 
same stiff, crooked and horny fingers here as in Mr. Hurd’s picture, and 
the square-headed Child looks out of the same eyes as the children over 
the bier of S. Ranieri in Pisa and in the Boston panel. These three 
heads coincide detail for detail, and exhibit the same puffed-out cheeks, 
the same high sloping foreheads, the same round eyes and sockets. (S. 
P. 12, 13, 14.) Antonio mechanically varied his types out of a full and 
diversified stock, to heighten the illusion of actuality, and our Virgin 
borrows the mask of the ecclesiastic at the saint’s right in the Refec- 
tion of S. Ranieri, both heads being modelled with the same untamed 
sense of physical density (S. P. 10, 6). The upper angel (Fig. 5) on the 
right of the Virgin, again simulates the monk carrying the salver at 
the right of the same fresco (S. P. 1). 

Confrontation, however, might be carried to the most illusive par- 
ticulars without bringing final conviction. For the proof of authorship, 
reposes in the tractable, watchful — in the clairvoyant attention. And 


68 


to such a one the identity of style between the Hannover Virgin and the 
Camposanto frescoes must be clear, and its realization as immediate, 
as revelation. So close in my opinion, is this identity, that it is rela- 
tively certain the two were painted at about the same time. In the very 
Pisan character of our picture, in fact, Owing, it is true, rather to the 
traces Antonio has left in subsequent painting there, than to the admis- 
sion of local influences — lurks the probability of its having been painted 
in Pisa; and this surmise, if allowed the status of a fact, would bring its 
painting close to the date of the Camposanto frescoes, which documents 
confine between 1384 and 1387. 

If these three years measure the whole extent of his Pisan sojourn, 
the painting of an Assumption (Fig. 6) now in the conventual chapel 
of S. Tommaso in Pisa* cannot have followed very far after that of 
the Hannover panel, though its inclusion within this period would de- 
pend upon the additional hypothesis that the present was his only 
visit.” 

Antonio’s only surviving panel on Pisan ground, the Assumption, 
in figures somewhat below life-size, would none the less seem to have 
been painted considerably later than the Hannover panel. On first 
glance it looks rather Sienese than Florentine; one cannot hesitate long 
however ; on closer view it carries one towards the following of Taddeo 
Gaddi, and the beginning of the last quarter of the Trecento. But for 
the extreme right side — where all the lost original surface has been 
covered by a veil of thin modern repaint — and local restorations else- 
where, the panel is in tolerably good state. 

To decide the question of its authorship, the foregoing considerations 
would almost commit us to a choice between Spinello Aretino and An- 
tonio Veneziano, two Florentines of gifts above the average, working 
in Pisa around 1380 and subjected to slight infiltrations of Sienese in- 
fluence. Between painters so distinct in character and so unlike each 
other, there can be little hesitation in deciding. 

Asuperficial glance, however, should glean enough reason to bring the 
painting within our master’s work. The angel on the left with long nar- 
row eyes and fleshy face, playing a zither, repeats the type and expression 
of the dropsical woman in the fresco at the Camposanto representing 
the Death of S. Ranieri (S. P. 5, 4), and the Virgin resembles the 
same figure in feature. The level upper lip of the “Assunta” will be 
found in the acolyte and in the putto (S. P. 12) over the bier of S. 
Ranieri. The large eye underscored by a line parallel to the lower lid 
in the profile of the piping angel at the left, reappears in the three 


69 


profiles turned right in the Refection of S. Ranieri at the Camposanto. 
The shape of the right hand of the same angel is from Antonio’s varied 
stock, and might have been noted in the right hand of the Hannover 
Virgin. While the similarity of the two upper heads on the left in both 
paintings should alone constitute a proof of common authorship, one 
would be led to expect the foreshortening of the head of the uppermost 
angel on the left in a more advanced stage of the Antonio who painted 
the angel in the corresponding position in the Hannover panel. The 
way he has furrowed and lighted the interval between the nose and 
upper lip will be found everywhere in his frescoes. One other detail 
that appears in both these pictures and nowhere else among his works 
(nor, for that matter, among those of any other Florentine) is the 
motive of the double ellipse in all the halos of the Assumption, save 
those of the Virgin, the cherubs, and the upper angel on the left; and 
in the right cuff and the hem of the Hannover Virgin. But though 
conclusive in my opinion, the occurrence of the ellipse in these two 
pictures makes not nearly so insinuating a proof, as the character of its 
stamping in the gold, or the feeling for solid mass. 

There are not many devotional pictures of the latter half of the 
fourteenth century at once so fresh, so temperate, so blissful, as the 
Virgin and Child (Fig. 7) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It 
might appropriately have been an offering of thanks or praise made by 
the gentle and eager spirit of the tiny donor. The painting has none 
of the over-urged gravity which had become, and was to remain, a con- 
vention before the secularization of art in Italy. There is sweetness, 
piety, benevolence, but no passion nor pedantry. 

Its animation irradiates from within. It presents the moment when 
a sudden gladness has floated up into the Child’s face, who, arrested 
by an inner movement, deeper and vaguer than His knowledge, looks 
up in a sort of wonder at His mother. The glance is grateful to Her 
and She responds with a nod full of tenderness, and proffers Him the 
breast. She raises the left shoulder in the act, in an attitude that had 
been running in the blood of Sienese art like a family trait, ever since 
the thirteenth century.” 

Our painter avoids symmetry, throwing the group off the axis to 
emphasize its air of impulsive spontaneity, which the action, suspended 
for an instant in passage, the unaccomplished movement, and the 
studied casual relation between the act and its end, the psychological 
absorption, all confer upon the picture. Even the bird is not merely 
an abstract symbol. He has his situation, whose logic forces him into 


70 


fluttering struggle for release. The profounder possibilities of the 
subject were not deliberately set aside, they simply found no place in 
the present conception. 

A strong and lively color flashes over the picture, rising from the 
dark blue of the Virgin’s mantle to a high yellow in the Child’s tunic 
(which is reddish in the shadow), and to the light green in the scarf 
over His legs. In spite of the modelling of individual parts, which car- 
ries the shadow to a deep gray, in spite of the architectural pattern and 
rounded contours, there is a singular flatness over the face of the group, 
which is inherent, as we shall see, in the aesthetic of this master. 
Christ’s body is, accordingly, faced outward and extended along the 
surface rather than foreshortened, and His legs are crowded in depth, 
cramping the right arm of the Virgin. The forms are not granted 
their full share of relief or of free space, in a scheme which is built up 
architecturally, but maintains the flatness of a facade. 

The vertical outer contours of the Virgin’s dress rise with the later- 
al boundaries of the panel toward the gracefully pointed top, em- 
bossed with cusps, the like of which is not to be found in the earlier 
Florentine painting, but commonly in Siena. 

The gladness, the exchange of glances, the divine familiarity, the 
design, are reminiscent of Bernardo Daddi, and, back of him, of the 
Lorenzetti, only our picture manifests a more deliberate research of 
infantile psychology. 

In the endeavor to trace the identity of the painter of our panel, 
accordingly, conjecture would take us to Siena, to those among her 
masters of the late fourteenth century, who had not forgotten the 
Lorenzetti (Ambrogio rather than Pietro) and still felt the strong in- 
centive of Daddi. But Siena produced no one who is stylistically close 
enough to our picture to have painted it. Nor did Florence, unaided. 
My refusal of the panel to Spinello Aretino,” under whose name it for 
some time hung, should require no substantiation. Our Virgin is too 
remote in temper from this grave and ponderous master, and nothing 
less than the failure of repeated conjecture can have been responsible 
for the attribution. 

To find a combination of Sienese and Florentine characteristics 
one often has to go to Pisa, and it is in Pisa, in the Camposanto, that 
we find our master, in three damaged scenes from the life of S. Ranieri. 
Admitting natural disparities between fresco and tempera, and assum- 
ing a discrepancy in the dates of the two paintings, the manner, the 


71 


types and the aesthetic content of our picture betray the same artistic 
personality. 

Antonio Veneziano has a Florentine understanding of physical den- 
sity, and the modelling shadow within, or beyond the edge, in the Cam- 
posanto series, is a Florentine convention that goes back to the thirteenth 
century, and in its persistence in the typically Florentine low marble- 
relief, manifests its suitability to a peculiarly Florentine feeling for 
plasticity. ‘This mode renders the figure in flat masses, as in the Ob- 
sequies of S. Ranieri, where it best shows its desired effects of archi- 
tectural solidity and breadth. Thus our Virgin’s head and the Christ’s 
body are modelled by a narrow margin of shadow like the figure of S. 
Ranieri, and the smiling putto at the right, of the above fresco; and the 
arms of both the frescoed figures are handled exactly as in our picture. 
The tendency to cut the shadow sharply at the line of the jaw in the 
acolyte above S. Ranieri and in the putto at the left of the group of 
children on the right in the same fresco, reappears in both our principal 
heads. Antonio is fond at times of puffing out the cheek as in the afore- 
mentioned acolyte, and repeats it in our Christ along with the inner 
contour. The cheek is treated differently again in the foremost figure 
in the galley in the Return of S. Ranieri, and almost exactly as it oc- 
curs in our donor. The faint furrows below and above the heavy out- 
line of the eye and the white circle round the iris, so characteristic of 
the frescoes, recurs in our faces. The hair drawn in strands, in the child 
above S. Ranieri’s head in the Obsequies of S. Ranieri, and in the old 
angler at the right in the Miracles of S. Ranieri, is seen elaborated, 
though virtually the same, in our Child. 

The large ungainly hands, that misleadingly recall certain ones by 
Spinello are of the same make as ours, and the left one of the acolyte in 
the Obsequies of S. Ranieri, is drawn and modelled with less hesita- 
tion, but on the same pattern as the right hand of our Virgin. 

The resemblances of type afford more obvious proof. The head of 
the young fisherman at the extreme right of the Miracles of S. Ranieri 
is a reversal of the head of our Virgin (S. P. 3, 2), only the feminine 
mould is rounder. But the heads incline similarly and the eyes with 
their long tapering tails have the same mischief-lurking glance. The 
nose, the sensitive depression at the corners of the mouth, and the re- 
cesses below the lower lip, help to constitute a family resemblance. And 
the Child is conceived in a spirit, and upon a model, which served the 
master in the painting of the putto left of the group of children at the 
extreme right of the Obsequies of S. Ranieri. Only our Christ is 


72 


/ «ah oo 


younger, and the irradiation of joy in His face cannot yet be called 
rapture. The startled head of the putto left of the same fresco is 
equally remote in mood from the two just mentioned, but the heavy 
and deliberate line, the posture and the collocation of parts, are as near- 
ly identical with our Christ as is possible in two heads painted at dif- 
ferent evolutionistic moments. (S. P. 13, 12.) 

In the Spring of 1923, chance brought two panels representing 
saints Paul and Peter to Florence, where they turned up at a visiting 
English dealer’s, and passed directly thereupon into the collection of 
Charles Loeser (Figs. 8,9). Of twin shape and dimensions (.435 x .295 
m.) with the same embossed course of cusped arches following the 
curved edge of the panel, they belong to the same polyptych. 

My eye was instantly struck by the identity of these courses and 
that of the Boston Virgin. I, then, noted that the halos had the same 
ground of dotted tooling, and the same triads of tiny crosses producing 
a notched edge around the circle, and only this difference among them, 
that those of the saints were appropriately less ornate. The borders of 
the draperies had the same width and similar ornamental motives. In 
view of stylistic analogies, these incidental coincidences persuaded me 
that the two saints stood right and left of the Boston Virgin in the 
original three-leaved —or, five-leaved—polyptych. Let the larger di- 
mensions of the central panel (.587 x .394 m.) hinder no one from ac- 
cepting this conclusion: the relative sizes of the three parts represent 
a not uncommon ratio. But now what are these “stylistic analogies?” 
They appear in the drawing of the left hand of Peter and those of the 
Madonna, of the eyes of the Child and those of St. Peter, in the swing- 
ing and unconstructive line of the draperies. 

The three panels were all painted by Antonio. To clench the proof 
one would only have to compare Peter’s head, his ear and his hand to 
those of the old man standing next the S. Ranieri in the Miracle of the 
Wine and the Water (S. P. 9, 7), or Peter’s Figure to the St. James at 
Gottingen (Fig. 10), where the thin light streaks the ridges of the folds 
in the same way.” The borders show the same type of ornament; the 
heads the same drawing and modelling; the pigment the same texture. 

The state of the panel representing St. James at Gottingen bestows 
an advantage upon it over the others. It still bears the original im- 
pasto, and only local restorations. His head partakes of the type of 
S. Ranieri in the Separation of the Wine from the Water (Fig. 11), 
and of the greybeard who leans a face towards him (S. P. 7), in 
pose and mien repeating ours. The left hand with the arched thumb 


73 


will not startle one to dissent, if one will try to recollect the hands at 
the extreme right of the Refection of S. Ranieri. The appealing glance, 
the suffused sentiment are Antonio’s own. His head is an almost un- 
modified reversal of the head of the Boston Virgin (S. P. 8, 2), and re- 
peats her mood. There is the same stark curve in the line, the same 
border and the same arbitrariness in the draperies. But for the differ- 
ent moulding and frame, which, notwithstanding, are joined by family 
likeness, one might suppose him to have stood in the same original 
polyptych. 

One more panel in the possession of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, has only 
the other day found its way into this group. Itis a fragment (Fig. 12) of 
what was originally a course of half-length saints that ran above the full- 
sized figures of an altarpiece. The resemblance of the medallion between 
the shoulders of the frames that enclose the two young saints, to those 
in the spandrils at Gottingen suggests a close chronological relation be- 
tween them. The larger heads display all the characteristic traits of the 
master that have been reiterated in the course of this essay; but the 
execution has the cursory directness of long habit. ‘The two saints, who 
exhibit features paralleled more visibly in the Hannover and Pisan 
panels, than elsewhere, are as evidently in the tradition of Gaddi; ac- 
cordingly it would perhaps be reasonable to place them nearest the 
former picture. 

Until recently I have been confined by ignorance to the usual cau- 
tious inconclusiveness, in dealing with the small panel at S. Niccolo 
Reale in Palermo. In an article published in Art in America for 
April, 1923, I felt obliged to deny it to Antonio.” 

The panel” lists the names of departed members of the Confrater- 
nity of S. Niccolé in four double columns, which alternate with three 
decorative bands containing medallions with busts of saints. The four 
corners of the square are held by the four Evangelists in larger medal- 
lions. This area is crowned by a gable-shaped representation of the 
Scourging of Christ (Fig. 13) with still larger medallions containing 
Mary and John lamenting at its sides. Just under it stands an inscrip- 
tion with the date of the painting: MIJIILXXXVIII.* In the sig- 
nature below the two lowest medallions, only the following is legible: 
A (a small part of the downward stroke of what may have once been 
an N) LO ... DA VINEXTASPTINAT =. 

This is the only painting by Antonio bearing both the autographed 
name and date, but as it is the only one we possess on so small a scale, 
we should have to know just how far to avail ourselves of it as a basis 


74 


for further attributions. So that apart from helping to clench those al- 
ready made, by repeating the testimony furnished by other paintings, 
its inclusion among his works will help us only in a limited measure in 
placing any given panel with any greater precision in a chronological 
order. 

But before going any farther, let us see if it is possible to draw the 
S. Niccolo panel securely into the line of Antonio’s works. First, then, 
let me say that the mutilated signature need not be regarded as conclu- 
sive evidence of authorship ; and even if complete, it might refer to an- 
other painter of Venetian origin with a similar Christian name. Of the 
patronymic, which would distinguish our Antonio from all others, 
barely two letters are left, and these are not in our Antonio’s name as 
given in documents. In any case the signature can only be considered 
decisive when confirmed by the internal evidence of style. 

This it has been difficult to reach under the conditions under which 
the picture is at present visible, and to make examination still harder, 
the surface though essentially in good state is grimy and worn in 
spots. But once the eye has got its chance, the picture yields the in- 
formation one requires, and adds faith to one’s final convictions. It 
should not take one long to find it charged with Antonio’s peculiarities. 
The summary, sweeping, decisive line, swifter here than in his frescoes 
or larger panels, carries in it Antonio’s character at every point. The 
types are spirited, and there is a vivid animation about his figures 
which is lost when they are stretched to large scale. The pattern in 
conjunction with the chiaroscuro render shapes that are paralleled in 
the frescoes, and as might be expected, in the small figures chiefly. 
Thus the heads of the mariners in both the representations of ships, 
show the same juxtaposition of lights and darks, the same vividness of 
life in the impulsive movements, the same type of realism as the 
Scourging in Palermo. There is a broad and widening track of the 
brush to render the high light on the nose, rising above the same shad- 
ows at either side of it, with a similar setting of the eye in the mari- 
ners of the Embarkation (Fig. 14) and in the Scourging. Allowing for 
obvious differences, analogies as conclusive will appear between the S. 
Niccold panel and the larger panels. An interesting instance of such 
analogy is afforded by the Loeser St. Paul and the left flagellant in the 
Palermo Scourging, to be discussed later. They have the identical 
pattern and type, only that the latter is more emphatically charac- 
terized, and that the characterization is more concentrated than 
in the larger painting. The hands in the Palermo panel reveal a 


75 


feeling that may also be detected in the hands in the frescoes. The 
arched thumb and the rounded interval between it and the index finger, 
so frequent in the frescoes, recur in the panel, especially in the St. John, 
the Evangelist and the St. Matthew (Fig. 15) who so closely resembles 
the sleeping greybeard in Pisa (Fig. 16), but the smaller scale brings 
with it shorter fingers, drawn more closely together, and though 
clenched, in instances, with a similar tension, they are bounded by a 
swifter line. ‘The huge ears, present everywhere in Antonio’s frescoes, 
reappear in the St. Luke and in the St. Mark, only more conspicuously 
than elsewhere in this panel. In the drapery there are analogies be- 
tween the smaller figures in the Camposanto frescoes and the Scourg- 
ing in the choice of its prominent features, and the instantaneous way 
they are set down; between the sweeping folds of the St. Paul and those 
of the S. Niccolo St. Luke. But these particulars should be regarded 
merely as indications of immanent affinity. 

All these panels are linked together by points of crucial agreement 
among themselves, as well as to the documented paintings at the Cam- 
posanto. But while they are all by the same hand, the aesthetic and 
material factors in the production of panel and fresco painting divide 
them. 

Their differences originate in the divergent aesthetic intention of 
the two techniques. It was designed that the Camposanto frescoes 
should deploy the miraculous gests of a venerable saint rather as his- 
toric than as symbolic events. To compass this Antonio crowds and 
animates his scenes by juxtaposing rapt and wandering or amused at- 
tention, and sudden movements, in emphatic contrast, in order to 
simulate the full and random shuffle of life, the life of a quick and 
hardy race, magnified to heroic scale and moving against the back- 
ground of soaring Cyclopean cities. Such a type of narrative had to 
go in search of large wall spaces, had to be painted upon slowly drying 
intonaco — which means rapidity of execution —in a medium that 
produces a pale lustreless surface. ‘The bands that run around the four 
sides of each compartment are but a means of delimiting it. 

The panel, on the other hand, standing free of the wall, begins by 
being confined to a much more limited area by the dimensions of the 
altar, and the physical nature of wood. Unlike fresco, the slow, strati- 
fied tempera-technique brings up a richer color against a gold back- 
ground, which replaces the sky, and haunts the painting with sugges- 
tions of space and of light. The altarpiece stands alone over a sym- 
metrical altar, a symbol of eternity before the worshipper who bows be- 


76 


fore it in absorbed prayer. It avoids progressive action which would 
require continuous space, and would besides tend to fix it in time; and 
declares itself rather in terms of “being.” The figures against this ab- 
stract setting are faced outward in a single plane and in a bilateral 
arrangement from left to right — immobilized by the altarpiece’s in- 
herent symmetry in which the two halves neutralize each other. And 
any betrayal of feeling in the faces is there by a concession, which those 
later less austerely religious ages have wheedled from the relaxed holi- 
ness of the sacred personages. 

Panel painting is thus committed by its function and its materials 
to the idealistic mode. And the presentation being ideal, the frame, 
does not merely delimit it as in the essentially realistic fresco, but is 
absorbed in its plan and decorative organization. It determines the 
architectural character and independence of the panel. Accordingly, 
while the panels and frescoes of Antonio Veneziano are radically iden- 
tical in style, these differences, as I have said, isolate the panels, and 
open through them upon a more intimate corner of Antonio’s genius. 
They confess finally to certain influences with less reserve. 

If the wall paintings exhibit radical forms derived exclusively from 
Taddeo Gaddi; if his sprawling scenes puff out Taddeo’s pompous and 
clumsy decorations ; if the make, scale, pattern, type and state of his 
figures, the hands, the hair, are habitual adaptations from him; the 
panels uncover a more poetic temper in Antonio, which tends to dis- 
guise his Gaddesque origins, by showing him now under the influence 
of Daddi, now under that of the Sienese. 

It is true that the Hurd Coronation and the Hannover Virgin con- 
tinue the testimony of the Life of S. Ranieri. The stolidity, the 
squareness of the figures in these two panels, their bearing, and their 
types, are out of Gaddi’s studio-stock, but the lusty voices of the angels 
of the Hannover picture seem already to be raising a protest against 
the sullen dumbness of Antonio’s master. 

The first hint of specific appropriation from Siena comes in the sen- 
timent of the St. James and the Boston Virgin — an appropriation one 
might think due, as I once have, to the mediation of Daddi, and with 
right possibly, in spite of certain explicit features—here and else- 
where — in Antonio, not present in Daddi, nor in his taste, nor again 
Florentine, but apparently come along with more essential characters 
from Siena. Though it is hazardous to be too precise in separating 
influences so deeply rooted in a Florentine subsoil, it would seem 
likelier, in the light of what he took in details from Sienese painting, 


77 


that he had gone directly to the Sienese. The sentiment in the relation 
between mother and child in the Boston panel especially, flatters sucha 
view. But if one finds the like of it more often in Siena in the Lorenzet- 
ti, one will also find it nearer home in Florence in Daddi’s Virgin now in 
the Naples Museum, not to mention many similar works of sculpture. 

The architectural mass bound by verticals in the Boston panel, is 
canonically Florentine; it serpentines downward, however, in — to 
take the most conspicuous of extant instances— as in the Ambrogio 
Lorenzetti Virgin in Mr. Platt’s collection, or in his Virgin in S. Fran- 
cesco in Siena. And yet its bodily twist also resembles the movement 
of the Virgin in Daddi’s Uffizi triptych. 

The type of Mr. Loeser’s St. Paul is more explicitly Sienese in 
derivation ; just as the beauty-proud young falconer at the extreme left 
of the Separation of Wine from Water in the Camposanto haunts 
many a Sienese painting and seems here to be aping the youth in the 
foreground of A. Lorenzetti’s Consecration of St. Nicholas of Bari 
(one of four scenes illustrating his life) at the Uffizi. 

The S. Tommaso Assumption follows the traditional Sienese for- 
mula for the subject, even if the masses are left large, and the surface 
has nothing of the Sienese ripple. The close adherence of the Virgin’s 
dress to Sienese fashion renders it even likely he had a specific model 
before him; and more than one detail, the angels’ wings for example, 
the fall of loose rich locks over the neck — of the uppermost angel on 
the left particularly — are of Sienese cut and fashion. 

But perhaps the most exclusively Sienese of all his borrowings, is 
the ornamental detail of the double ellipse, which occurs in the As- 
sumption and again in the Hannover picture. This particular, besides, 
being profoundly un-Florentine in taste, and appearing in no other 
Florentine instances known to me, is frequent in Siena as early as Duc- 
cio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and as late as Matteo.” 

Another feature as un-Florentine in form, as it is strikingly Sienese, 
is the cusp running within the arch of the frame of the Boston — Loeser 
triptych, of the Hannover Virgin and Angels, and of the St. James. 
The like of it occurs from one end to the other of Sienese painting, but 
closest to the present instances in Simone’s Christ’s Return from the 
Temple at Liverpool and the Senator Clark triptych by Vanni. 

Here and there, the types, and chiefly in some of the profiles, seem 
foreign ; and Antonio’s treatment is occasionally so un-Florentine as to 
make one wonder how and where he could have come by it. The soft 
modelling of the smaller heads; of the donor in the Boston panel and 


78 


of some of the mariners in the Camposanto, of the heads in the me- 
dallions over the St. James, and in Mr. Hurd’s two saints there is a 
chiaroscuro that suggests Sienizing painters of Northern Italy like 
Giovanni da Milano or Barnaba da Modena both of whom he prob- 
ably knew, and on either of whom he might willingly have drawn. 

Finally the thin streak of light on the ridge at the ends of the folds, 
most evident in the healthy surface of the Loeser saints, and of the St. 
James, appear, in Andrea Vanni, and clearer than elsewhere in his two 
well-preserved saints at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and in the 
drapery of Beato Andrea Gallerani by the same master in a private 
collection in Perugia.” 

This enumeration of Sienese analogies would dispose one for the 
conclusion that Antonio was at some moment following his formation, 
deeply taken by the spell of Sienese art, that he became steeped in its 
atmosphere, which he drew in with the air he breathed. The likelihood 
of Siena as the site of this influence is heightened by entries Milanesi 
found under the dates 1369 and 1370 in the books of the Works of the 
Sienese Cathedral, recording that Antonio (di Francesco da Venezia) 
worked for that church in company with Andrea Vanni.” 

This scrap of information then would prove, that at a relatively 
early period in his activity, a first hand and abundant Sienes influence 
was accessible to him, fifteen years before he is registered in Pisan 
documents, and when he was still young enough to feel its enchant- 
ments and carry them about in him. In Pisa we know, they continued, 
as they had doubtless begun in Florence,” where as in Pisa, Sienese 
paintings were present in sufficient abundance. 

To these enchantments as I have said, the panels bear more evident 
testimony than the frescoes.” More poetic than large realistic repre- 
sentations they find more to imitate in the lyrical painting of Siena. 
And painted in a different medium, within diverse material limitations, 
they betray the weakness of this rude though stately Florentine for its 
mobility of temperament, for its melodic line; albeit a true Florentine’s 
remoteness from the heart of its genius. The most Sienese of them all, 
the Boston — Loeser triptych, his St. James, exhibit a tendency, a 
movement, which while still involved in the inconvertible Florentine 
bulk, already anticipate the Gothicism of Lorenzo Monaco and of the 
early Quattrocento. 


79 


IO. 


II. 


12. 


13. 


14. 


NOTES 


. This essay has been partly anticipated in two separate studies in Arr 1x America for April, 1920, 


p. 99 and August, 1923, p. 217. 


. The fragmentary frescoes — of which the Christ here reproduced (Fig. 1) is the best preserved 


figure —in the ruined tabernacle at the Torre degli Agli, at Nuovoli, near Florence, have on 
Vasari’s word (II, 666) been accepted as Antonio’s. On purely internal evidence I should at 
present incline to attribute the surviving wreck to Antonio, because of clear affinities to the 
Camposanto cycle, without attributing it entirely to his hand, on account of a certain hesitation 
in statement. Of all the frescoes at the Camposanto, other than the S. Ranieri scenes, given to 
Antonio by Vasari (I, 665-6), and Cavalcaselle (II, 286-7), only the two flying angels and the 
two adjoining angels in medallions bearing legends, under Traini’s Hermit Life, are by him. 


. Ciampi, Notizie Inedite, etc., 151-152. 


Vasari, II, 663-666. 
Lest, 1,°282,.n. 2: 


. Published in Arr rv America, 1920, p. 99. 
. See note 23. 


. Five of these were published in 1923 in the August number of Arr mv America. Altogether I 


recognize Antonio’s hand in eight panels; rejecting all, but most emphatically the following, 
among those that have been openly claimed for him: A Crucifix at S. Croce (attributed tenta- 
tively by O. Sirén, Giottino, Leipzig, 1908, 94, to Antonio, and restored here p. 49 to the Master 
of the Fogg Pieta); a Bearded Prophet, reproduced in the Artaud de Montor Catalogue, Paris, 
1843, plate 17 (attributed by Schmarsow, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1898, 502, to Antonio, 
later properly ascribed by Sirén, in Lorenzo Monaco, Strassburg, 1905, 44, to Lorenzo Monaco); 
a fragment of six Apostles, in the Gallery at Altenburg, and the Nardesque Saints in Munich 
(attributed by Schmarsow to Antonio in the Festschrift zu Ehren des Kunsthistorischen Instituts 
in Florenz, Leipzig, 1898, 131); a Pieta in the Jarves Collection at Yale University, attributed by 
Crowe and Cavalcaselle (first English Ed., I, 491) when belonging to “Mr. Jervis in Florence,” 
and by Rankin (American Journal of Archaeology, 1895, II), to Antonio Veneziano. See Richard 
Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, New Haven, 1927, 42, where this Pieta is attributed 
to Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli. 


. The panel in S. Niccolé Reale, Palermo; reproduced as a whole in Testi, I, 289, 291. 
. Through the kind offices of Mrs. Walker D. Hines. 


. Formerly in a collection in Florence. 


I note here as a curiosity that may be interesting to the student, Raimond Van Marle’s disagree- 
ment with this attribution (III, 451). See Stechow, Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst, 1924-5, 209, 
who seconds my opinion. 


Van Marle (op. cit., V, 248) airily ascribes this picture to Turino Vanni, the Second, who, by 
having the works of several masters confused with his own in these pages, renders the attribution 
even more perplexing. 


One wishes some document would turn up to prove that this is part of the altarpiece Antonio 
painted for the organ-chapel in the Cathedral of Pisa in 1387 (see B. Supino, Il Camposanto di 
Pisa, Florence, 1896, 135); Forster, Beitrage, etc., 117-118. : 


This position of the body occurs in only those Florentines who have exposed themselves to the 
influences of the Sienese among whom it appears with frequency. 


A designation bestowed upon it in the Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (for 1916, 
XIV, 12), by Osvald Sirén, who has since verbally admitted the attribution to Antonio. The 


80 


ye. 
16. 
77. 
18. 


19. 


20. 
21. 


22. 


23. 


Museum authorities, I am pleased to see, have altered the label, but not without inserting a timid 
qualification. 


This attribution is accepted in Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst, in the article cited in note 10. 
I had known the picture in a poor photograph only. 
m. 1.50 X 1.00. 


To read as 1388. See De Marzo, La Pittura in Palermo nel Rinascimento (Palermo, 1899), 48, 
49; also Testi, I, 288-292. 


To take familiar instances, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maesta in Massa Marittima, Sassetta’s Ma- 
donna in Chiusdino, and Matteo di Giovanni’s Madonna in the collection of Mr. Clarence Mackay. 


This is not to say that this peculiarity occurs in no other master. 
Milanesi, Documenti Senesi, I, 305. 
Registered in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali in Florence in the year 1374. 


If the panels added to the frescoes broaden the basis for his Florentine derivation and his Sienese 
influence — they help to contravert the now unfashionable, but still reiterated, absurdity that 
Antonio was formed on Altichiero, first suggested by Schubring (Altichiero und Seine Schule, 
Leipzig, 1898, 131) assumed by Testi (I, 286), and, evasively, by Venturi (V, 916). The 
exact contemporaneity of the works of these two masters alone defies this thesis. Van Marle 
(III, 451, 452) derives him from Maso, and the painters confused with him, but this can result 
only from an incomplete and erroneous view of the masters involved. Antonio, as I have pointed 
out, is intimately Gaddesque in his radical type, and in his statement. 


SI 


Ae 


DETAILS FROM THE ParntTincs or ANTONIO VENEZIANO 


1. Pisa, Camposanto, Refection of S. Ranieri. 8. Géttingen, University Gallery, St. James. 
2. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Madonna 9. Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, St. Peter. 
3. Pisa, Camposanto, Miracles of S. Ranieri. 10. Hannover, Kestner Museum, Madonna and Angels. 
4. Pisa, Camposanto, Obsequies of S. Raniert. 11. Pisa, Camposanto, Refection of S. Ranieri. 
5s. Pisa, S. Tommaso, Assumption. 12. Pisa, Camposanto, Obsequies of S. Ranieri. 
6. Pisa, Camposanto, Refection of S. Ranieri. 13. Boston, Museum of Fine Art, Madonna. 
ee eee ee ae eee eae aR ae FE RS SS AR OP lee SS SRS, TPO, he I 


Amasle 


PS at EEE EOE 


We, 


vi 


Fic. 1. Antonio VENEZIANO: Last Fic. 12. Antonio VENEZIANO: Two SaInTS 
JUDGMENT (Detatt) Collection of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, New York 


Tabernacle, Nuovoli 


L\Se 


Fic. 2. Antonio VENEZIANO: CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN Fic. 3. Antonio VENEZIANO: REFEcTION oF S. RANIERI 


Collection of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, New York Camposanto, Pisa 


ri} 


— 


iz 


Fic. 4. Antonio VENEzIANO: Maponna AND ANGELS Fic. 5. Antonio VENEZIANO: Maponna Anp AnceEts (DETAIL) 


Kestner Museum, Hannover, Germany Kestner Museum, Hannover, Germany 


Fic. 8. Antonio VENEZIANO: St. Paut Fic. 7. Antonio VENEZIANO: Maponna AND CHILD Fic. 9. Antonio VENEZIANO: St. PETER 
Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence 


Fic. 10. AntTonto VENEZIANO: ST. JAMES Frc. 11. Anronto VengziANo: Mrracte or SEPARATION OF THE WINE FROM THE WatTER (DeraiL) 


University Gallery, Gottingen, Germany ° Camposanto, Pisa 


Fic. 13. Antonio VENEZIANO: THE Scourcinc oF Curist (Detai.) 


Church of S. Niccolo, Reale, Palermo 


Fic. 14. Antonio Veneziano: Tue Emparcation (Deratt) 


Camposanto, Pisa 


Fic. 16. Antonio VENEZIANO: THE Miracle 
OF THE WINE AND THE WarTEeR (DeEraiz) 


Camposanto, Pisa 


Regge SE eee 
5 Pas | 


pen 


“ge 


<< 


je 
fe 
F 
f 
t 

\ 

. 


wy 


TAG nse 


AnTonio VENEZIANO: St. MatrHew 


Church of S. Niccold, Palermo 


(Deratt) 


—" ~ 


fa 


WENA MHA 


a a ee Be 


eee 


iP 


7 ee 


“ 


— 


EP. 
NNT RLS 


Nicco.o pi Prerro Gerini: St. ANTHONY 


es 


Fic. 


ANGELS 


ND 


THE ABBOT A 


ardner Muscum, Fenway Court, Boston 


G 


NICCOLO DI PIETRO GERINI' 


NTIMATE knowledge of the Florentine Trecento is still so scat- 

tered, our command of its aesthetic and evolution still so uncertain, 
that we should hardly regard the two pictures here reproduced a 
necessary pretext for a reconsideration of the most prolific, if unequal, 
of masters on the declining slope of the century. The pictures besides, 
(and we shall speak of them first) being, in spite of all stylistic dispari- 
ties, of the same period, help us to a complete and closer view of an 
advanced stage in Niccol6 di Pietro Gerini’s activity. 

The earlier of the two, in fact, the Virgin at the Museum of Fine 
Arts, in Boston (Fig. 1), so much higher in pitch than other pictures 
by him, might well reconstitute the disparaging estimate critical con- 
vention has made of him. It is the most genial and well-rounded of 
his works, and nowhere else does he as happily sustain the mood from 
first to last. If his Crucifix (Fig. 2) at S. Croce, his diffuse Entomb- 
ment (Fig. 3), with all its fundamental difficulties, represent the best he 
was capable of, never again is he so lyrical, never again does he find a 
note so well suited to his voice. This radical character, indeed, of our 
Virgin, while it distinguishes it from the run of painting in his own day 
or of that of earlier Giotteschi, brings it close to the work of the Cioni, 
whose influence was strong and enduring within the Gerini school. Its 
presence in our picture is persuasive, even if Niccolo’s method is more 
rigid, more dryly intellectual. 

Its peculiar aesthetic is the result of a scrupulous tempering of all 
the components, which reduces their individualities until they integrate 
themselves by close and reciprocal cohesion. ‘They cease at a certain 
moment to be objects of visual apprehension to become objects of men- 
tal synthesis. The master has simplified the inner contours, and am- 
plified the outer edge to a unified continuity. Outline thus becomes 
an architectonic rather than a descriptive element and both figures, 
close-locked and upright, are held firmly within it. By the same prin- 
ciple the throne has been frontally placed, the group appropriately 
evading a rigid symmetry ; but the symmetries of both being concentric, 
the two terms, the architecture and the figures, are, on this account, at 
once assimilated to, and differentiated from, eachother. In harmonious 
agreement with the architecture at one moment, the suspended action 


83 


and the reticent figures detach themselves from its immobility at the 
next. Even the conspicuous horizontals at the base and the seat of 
the throne, and of the Virgin’s lap only serve to set off theimmanent and 
centralizing verticality. Everything within the frame holds together 
under a controlling upright symmetry, while the extended surfaces 
of the figures, and the spread throne sustain the flatness of a facade. 
As the eye moves upward from the broad to the suggestive passages, 
along the leading lines that converge in the Virgin’s head at the 
eminence of the topmost angle, it takes in all the tranquil majesty 
in the ascent. Below it we scarcely become aware of movement or 
action. Behind it the crockets wave like feathers. 

The Virgin’s head, the gentle hesitating hands, harbor a certain 
intensity. And we become sensible of the unexpressed thought, the 
contained movement, a sentiment not urged, barely articulated, by 
the same quality in the design. 

In our attribution of the Boston picture only its spiritual grace 
may give us pause. All the particulars come clean out of Niccold’s 
formula. Every stroke is true to his artistic character in so eminent a 
degree that the picture might be autographed, like the single figure of 
St. Catherine at Prato (S. P. 2, 3), which it most clearly resembles. Al- 
lowing for the diversities of medium, of the procedé and of proportion, 
the construction of the two heads and the total look are identical. 
There is a feature-for-feature correspondence. The eyes in both are 
long and narrow, and the more extended ones dip and rise at the cor- 
ner. The noses are similarly foreshortened, the mouths have the same 
arrow-head at the upper lip, and both have the same frail chin. In 
method our picture is yet closer to the Baptism in the National Gallery. 
It manifests the same type of flat modelling, the same drawing, the 
same quietism. In the arrangement, again, the design, profess their 
superiority over, but also their affinity with, the Virgin on the high altar 
at S. Croce.” In both we find the unyielding line drawn like wire 
along the edges of the drapery and the contours of the hands; the same 
throne, the same hair and the same scarf over it. The identity of the 
hands and the Christ in our picture and those in a panel representing 
the Virgin at the Museum in Avignon (a reversal of the S. Croce 
Virgin) establishes an identity of authorship, and the relative con- 
temporaneity of the three panels. Our Madonna, finally in many re- 
spects anticipates the central compartment of the 1404 altarpiece (No. 
11) at the Academy in Florence. 

And the period of its painting would fall among these works, one of 


84 


which only, the National Gallery Baptism is dated (1387). Our picture 
would appear.to approximate the period of the several others which are 
later, the Baptism establishing with fair certainty a terminus ante. But 
as caution is more prudent than too narrow precision in all matters of 
chronology, it is reasonable to place our picture in a period between 
the Baptism and the Prato frescoes’ (dating probably from about 
1395) which would mean around 1392. 

In the Virgin belonging to Mr. Ryerson (Fig. 5) the proportion 
of the uncovered area to the group is designed to isolate and enhance 
its plastic solidity. There is no place for spatial suggestions; no ex- 
pansion. The level background is reduced to the special and limited 
function, of quickening and reinforcing our apprehension of the cubic 
mass, of the visible passage from flatness to relief. The parts being 
extended, we read from left to right along a surface sustained at a 
swelling evenness of low plasticity. The artist avoided breaking into 
the space to draw the eye inward, to prolong and complicate the sug- 
gestions of depth with foreshortening and overlapping. Our picture 
then, recommends itself primarily by a determinate and quantitative 
roundness proper to periods that belonged originally and essentially 
to sculpture. 

Tectonically our picture is Giottesque. The organization of struc- 
ture through immanent movement was the exploit and glory of another 
century, but the Trecento had begun with a vision of form in which the 
forces of life triumph over the dead weight of gravity. Does not much 
of the fundamental aesthetic of figure art arise out of the balanced con- 
flict of these two principles? The full weight of the solid Child, the 
relaxed and inclining head of the Virgin are drawn into close opposition 
to the rise of the verticals. And in effect with its balance of up-and- 
down tendencies: of weight bearing downward, of resistance holding it 
at equilibrium, our group is in essence architectural. It conforms 
throughout to the boundaries of the picture, and the generalized con- 
tour rising with the sides of the frame closes at the top under its arch. 
The mass thus becomes part of the total architectural idea. The ulti- 
mate fact of its aesthetic, then, abides in the constant conflict and 
reconciliation between the sense of growth and the sense of gravity, and 
the whole seen ingenuously has the character, and something of the 
grandeur, of a cathedral. 

Undifferentiated below, the mass complicates as it proceeds upward. 
The interest has been swept into the more variegated area within the 
arc from one elbow to the other of the Virgin, and the curved gable 


85 


formed by the line from head to shoulder on one side and continuing 
along the two heads on the other. The system of long crossing and 
recrossing lines generalizes this part of the picture for the eye, and 
simplifies the action. The main lines, those of the forearm of the 
Virgin, of the Child’s arm, of the eyes, of the parallel axes of the two 
heads, are graphic abstractions of the psychological moment. The 
Mother lays her hand tenderly on the Child, the Child caresses the 
Mother, and the reciprocity is implicit in their glances. However, as in 
all artistic expression, the sentiment is but another manifestation of the 
visible characters, and there is just so much of it here as will go into the 
specifically artistic terms of the painting. The yearning in the Virgin’s 
face may be read easily enough, but it will not fire the imagination. If 
it reaches the Child it does not penetrate Them both, and the panto- 
mime becomes almost wholly symbolic. 

But is our Virgin by Niccolo di Pietro? A question that involves 
the radical one of his identity. Cavalcaselle and more recently Dr. 
Sirén* have gone far enough in their reconstruction of this master to 
make more conclusive definition possible. An artist is but the sum of 
works consistent among themselves, and constant to the stylistic char- 
acter of those that are authentic. Our attribution must ultimately rest 
on the concept of the total personality — our proof upon confrontation 
with single, and if possible undeniable examples. 

The shapes then, and the types of the Ryerson Virgin may be 
found again in the signed and dated frescoes in the church of S. Fran- 
cesco, Pisa. The silhouette of the Virgin’s head, her face, its large 
mould, the glance, the strong neck are repeated, with certain adventi- 
tious differences, in the haloed woman behind the Magdalen of the 
Resurrection, and in the Blessed Virgin of the Ascension. The total 
aspect comes yet closer to other paintings, all of them modelled upon 
the same set of ideations, the same composite image: the Virgins in 
the Musée Calvet in Avignon, on the high altar at S. Croce in 
Florence, and in Prof. A. Kingsley Porter’s collection in Cambridge, 
Mass. But the resemblance — amounting almost to identity — of 
our Virgin to the St. Lawrence in the polyptych (dated 1404) at the 
Academy in Florence, puts the identity alike of hand and period be- 
yond all question. Niccolo’s development carried him from tall, un- 
articulated, leptocephatic to the compact, round-headed, flat-crowned 
type, from the narrow to the full eye. The St. Lawrence and our Virgin 
exhibit the same measure of these two characteristics at a conspicuous 
degree of similarity. But the analogies go farther and deeper: St. 


86 


Lawrence’s carriage, his bulk and make correspond with those of our 
Virgin, and he is grave and heavy-lipped like her. Now, as Niccolo’s 
evolution was uncommonly slow, degrees of resemblance or disparity 
between his works will not be disposed to the commonly implicit de- 
velopmental measures. I should incline, accordingly, to place the pic- 
ture within a chronological field, let us say, five years on either side of 
St. Lawrence’s date. But the conformity of our child to the type in the 
S. Croce altarpiece, and of the Virgin to somewhat earlier instances 
in works already mentioned, would, for an additional number of 
minuter, and more fugitive reasons, move Mr. Ryerson’s picture back 
towards the year 1400. 

If the natural sequel to purely intuitive reflexes be their determi- 
nation with reference to some one or several partis pris, then the 
process of separating the works of Niccolo di Pietro Gerini will be more 
difficult than in the case of almost any other Florentine, because the 
artistic content seldom carries us beyond the zone of common undiffer- 
entiable aesthetic experience. The imagination is indisposed to de- 
scend from its level to compass him, and barring a small number of 
exceptional cases, consents to do violence to the sensibilities only to 
have done with him once and for all. 

Owning then a primary artistic deficiency in Niccold’s work, it is 
impossible to make a positive estimate of it, because criticism arises in 
positive aesthetic adventure. 

Like Taddeo Gaddi, who was probably his first master, he fails to 
project himself by a want in the most dynamic and transforming of 
creative forces, intensity of the imagination. It is by this supreme en- 
ergy that vision becomes revelation, and revelation finally passes into 
emotion at the moment when it draws all differentiated details into the 
aesthetic vortex. But before his frescoes — at Pisa or Prato for ex- 
ample — the eye gropes, but fixes nowhere, and the attention hangs 
loose, there being no immediately discoverable relation between space 
and pattern or shape and shape. There is no compositional tension to 
hold them together. With an equal claim on our interest everywhere, 
mass and movement, repose and action are scattered over the surface 
to produce a sense of material progression, of physical importance, 
or merely a negation of void. 

The abstract currents of lines and masses, their organization in 
depth, are confused and uncertain, because his art is an externaliza- 
tion of vision that is neither immediate nor synthetic. He ends by 


87 


loading us with aesthetically unjustifiable circumstances or exhausts 
us with inanition. 

Nor, again, is there any element of sensibility in his work. Belong- 
ing to the grosser artistic intelligences, his paintings strike upon us 
with a brutal hardness. There is a total absence of quality. Instead 
he gives us the vision of a barren world of low-browed, obtuse, rock- 
hewn saints and great heroic clean-lipped women, sullen rather than 
solemn, ponderous rather than monumental, stolid rather than severe. 

To complicate the initial difficulty of classification, the work of 
Niccolo is too often involved with that of pupils and fellow-artists 
whose help he needed to carry on the business of turning out a 
huge number of frescoes and altarpieces. Few other Italian painters 
of such contemporary reputation called in the assistance of as many 
collaborators. This mixture of hands seriously troubles the special 
problem of the critic, who would discover the guiding artistic per- 
sonality among those mixed with it, and differentiate between, first 
the unchanging, and then, the unstable principles of his style: his 
personality and his evolution. But as Niccolo’s artistic personality 
is so inextricably bound up with others, rather than seek to isolate 
it, we must content ourselves with tracing the progress of this many- 
headed hydra, which, with all its complexities, after all proceeds 
towards a common aim along a common course. It is accordingly, not 
impossible to determine the direction in which his art drifted. 

The problem of his origins is only in the course of solution. It is 
generally assumed that Niccolo was T'addeo’s pupil, and that there the 
problem ends. But the likelihood of this notion is diminished by a 
narrow scrutiny of the work — early as well as late — which discloses 
another influence, at least as determining in the total effect of his 
painting. This is the influence of Orcagna, for which the early docu- 
ments alone — running between 1370 and 1373 — ought to dispose 
us. In these he is spoken of as working in collaboration with Jacopo 
di Cione, who had taken over the practice of his brothers Nardo and 
Andrea. An independent master in 1368 (when he is registered in the 
Guild of the “Medici e Speziali”), he must still have been a young man, 
with his death occurring forty-seven years later, and must, judging 
from his works alone, have been deeply affected by Orcagna in the pre- 
ceding ten or even fifteen years. 

His early attested collaboration with Jacopo, which I have men- 
tioned above, tells us nothing about Niccolo’s first manner, because his 
share was nominal only, and the two Coronations, in London and 


88 


Florence, are by Jacopo from beginning to end, but the other incon- 
testable works by him and his ambient, hold a large element of Orcag- 
nesque influence. 

It is interesting that the painting, which professes it almost 
exclusively and more than any other by Niccolo, should be the Nation- 
al Gallery Baptism, the predella of which is full of the sullen reminis- 
cences of Taddeo. The sharpness of definition, and the color an- 
nounce the Orcagnesque affinity at the start, and the mould and out- 
ward truculence of Peter and John recall Nardo’s male types. But it is 
the figure of St. Paul that most completely betrays its origin. Whereas 
the Christ bears a more general relation to the characters in the Or- 
cagna’s polyptych in S. Maria Novella, the Paul is taken directly from 
the same personage in this altarpiece. Inessential deviations apart, the 
total pattern, posture, the draping, the glance, the shape of the crani- 
um, are very nearly identical in both; but the direct derivation of 
Gerini’s figure is settled by the scalloped hair, by the long, straight 
sharp-edged folds, by the zigzag light on the right arm, by a detail, 
typically Orcagnesque and as common in Gerini, the caret of the upper 
lip; by the relative position of the feet, and the way the stuff breaks 
over them. 

Less evident, but conclusive liens between the two masters will be 
found in almost every one of Gerini’s paintings, but chiefly in the types, 
the sharp lighting and hard definition of the Academy Entombment, 
the Gardner St. Anthony, the S. Croce Virgin; in the pure drawing of 
the hands, most conspicuous in the Boston Virgin. 

These appropriations overlay characters taken from Taddeo in a 
still earlier stage of Niccolo’s formation, but harmoniously fused from 
the first. 

The following series based upon dated works, represents a sus- 
tained stylistic change in Niccold’s activity though it would be pre- 
posterous to claim that such a change is discoverable between any two 
consecutive works. While the direction of his evolution may be cor- 
rectly indicated, the order of the items is not determinable. I have 
tried besides to differentiate between those works in which Niccold’s 
intimate characters were traceable and for those which he was less 
directly responsible, scrupulously avoiding too great precision in the 
absence of precise tokens. 

Tue Works or Niccotd D1 Pierro Gerini 
1370. London, National Gallery. Triptych: Coronation, Saints and Angels. 
Ordered from Niccolo di Pietro Gerini and Jacopo di Cione. First 


89 


1373. 


recorded commission to Niccolé. The cartography and the treatment 
is of the school of the Cioni throughout, without a trace of Niccold’s 
participation. Reproduced Sirén, II, Pl. 220; Van Marle, III, 495. 


Florence, Academy. Coronation. 
Commissioned for the Zecca Vecchia from Niccolé di Pietro and 
Jacopo di Cione, but here again Niccolé seems to have had no share in 
the execution whatever. Reproduced Van Marle, III, 494. 


1380. Florence, S. Croce, Castellani Chapel. Crucifix. (See Fig. 2). 


1386. 


Inscription A. D. MCCCLXXX Mess Iu Ter Ven Dni Miniatis 
ABBATIS. 

Earliest dated work by Niccolo. Still very Gaddesque (cf. with Tad- 
deo’s crucifixions in sacristies of Oquissauti, and of S. Croce, Florence). 
The Christ and particularly the head is so close to Taddeo’s Crucifix at 
Ruballa in the church of S. Giorgio, as to tempt one to the theory of 
direct influence. Drawing anticipates Entombment, and the Pisa 
frescoes. 


Florence, Academy. Entombment. (See Fig. 3). 
His most ambitious panel. Betrays his derivation from Taddeo, but 
is already a mature work and full of his constant characters. 


Philadelphia, Johnson Collection. Pieta. ‘~o *) 36% x 24%e Ins- 
A product of Niccolé’s shop, probably on his design. 


New York, Formerly Mr. Carl Hamilton. Crucifixion. 
Munich, Dealer. The Crucified between the Virgin and St. Anthony. 


Florence, Bigallo, Sala del Consiglio. Fresco: The Return of Lost Chil- 
dren by the Captains of the Misericordia to their Mothers. 

Reproduced in Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, 
1926, Fig. 114. 

Authenticated and dated by document of final payment to Niccold 
di Pietro Gerini and Ambrogio di Baldese (See Il Bigallo, Florence, 
Fratelli Alinari, 1905, pp. 24, 25, 45). Dr. Sirén in his Catalogues of 
the Jarves Collection, and of a Loan Exhibit of Italian Primitives held 
in New York in 1917, endeavours by separating the already known 
form-image of Niccolé from the fresco, (wherein the mixture of two 
styles renders the residuum all too uncertain) to arrive at the formula of 
Baldese, whose name he joins to a group of paintings constant to a 
single artistic personality, consistently professing contact with Bicci di 
Lorenzo and possibly Lorenzo Monaco, and a stage in the collective 
development proper to the second quarter of the 15th century. The 
hypothetical Baldese of the Bigallo fresco, however, seems to be an 
independent master in 1386, is born therefore in all likelihood between 
1350 and 1360, and in the fugitive signs he gives of himself demonstrates 
a much crasser sense of weight and of life than Dr. Sirén’s master of 
paper saints and imponderable Virgins. I am glad to see that Van 
Marle, III, 610, follows this: view. 


gO 


1387. 


1392. 


Fiesole, Church of Sta. Primerana. Presentation of Christ. 

Ruined and repainted fresco, left side of which leaves unmistakable 
traces of Niccold’s hand. The woman and child at the extreme left 
repeat a motive, and something of the spirit of the Bigallo fresco. 

Oxford, Christ Church Library. Young Saint. (No. 12). 

Identified first by Sirén, Thieme-Becker, Kiinstler Lexikon, 1920, 
XIII, 465-7; Pl. IV, of the Catalogue (Tancred Borenius) which calls 
it Florentine 1350-70. 


London, National Gallery. Baptism. 
The date is inscribed. Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 619. 


Florence, S. Miniato. An Apostle (possibly St. James). 

This conjectured date is based upon faint traces of an inscription the 
date of which has been partly reinforced, partly supplied in black lead 
to read as MCCCCXXXVII. As the figure above it is obviously of 
the fourteenth century there is high presumption that under the last 
C there was originally an L. 


London, Mr. Kerr-Lawson. St. Anthony, the Abbot, and St. Peter. 


Cambridge, Mass., Prof. A. Kingsley Porter. Virgin. 

This panel has been attributed to Lorenzo di Niccold (most recently 
by Mr. Berenson, Bollettino d’arte 1926, 312), who is, as we know him 
through his indisputable works, a master of a very different character. 
He can be responsible only for the execution of some of the details. 
Reproduction in Catalogue of Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives, 
New York, 1917, No. 11. 

Pisa, S. Francesco, Chapter-House. Frescoes. 


The signature and the date visible today only in part were read by 
Lasinio in his Raccolta de ’Pitture antiche etc. Tav. II. Pisa, 1820. 


Florence, S. Croce, Left aisle. Fresco-fragment of Crucifixion. 
Ex-refectory. Fragment Head of Crucified Christ (?). 

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Virgin. (Fig. 1). 
In Van Marle, III, 638, as a Lorenzo di Niccolo. 

Boston, Gardner Museum. St. Anthony, The Abbot and Angels. (Fig. 7). 
Attributed by Sirén, Giottino, 89, to Jacopo di Cione. 

Prato, S. Francesco, Chapter Hall. Frescoes. 
The signature given in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting 

in Italy, (Scribners, N. Y., 1903) II, 268, note 1. 


Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser. Crowned Personage and Attendants Kneel- 
ing Before a Column (Fragment). 


Avignon, Musee Calvet. Virgin. 
Florence, S. Croce. Virgin with two Saints, and the two predella scenes 
under St. Augustine and St. Gregory in the Choir Altarpiece. 
Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 146, 4, of their Italian edition, attach the 
date 1372 to this picture, at present no longer visible in the exposed 


gi 


1401. 


1404. 


parts of the panel. Its stylistic affinities, however, being with his more 
advanced works, draw it away from such early ones as the Crucifix in 
S. Croce, and the Entombment in the Academy, in Florence. If not 
misread therefore, the date given was not unlikely the date of com- 
mission. 


Pistoia, Museo Civico. Madonna and Two Saints. (No. 2353 


Florence, S. Croce, Sacristy. Fresco: Resurrection. 

The hands that shared in the covering of the same wall have never 
been satisfactorily differentiated. The Ascension is by an assistant of 
Niccold; the Way to Calvary by an assistant of Spinello Aretino; the 
Crucifixion with the border around it, including prophets and small 
scenes, by Taddeo Gaddi and assistants. 


Chicago, Ill., Mr. Martin A. Ryerson. Virgin. 
Oxford, Christ Church Library. Virgin in Prayer. (No. 9). 


Florence, Academy. Left Compartment of Triptych representing Corona- 
tion and Saints. 

Documents dated 1401, (see Vasari, I, 691, 3) record the commission 
of this altarpiece to Spinello Aretino, Niccolé di Pietro Gerini and Lo- 
renzo di Niccold. The central panel bears same date. Oddly enough 
the very clear and profound disparities between Spinello’s part, on the 
one hand, and that of Niccold and Lorenzo on the other, have never 
been noticed. The silvery tone of the right and central sections alone 
announces fundamental differences in the treatment of form. Lorenzo’s 
share in the painting is less apparent, but a certain haste in the drawing 
and shaping in the predella under Niccold’s saints remind one of similar 
traits in Lorenzo’s polyptych at S. Croce. Reproduced in Van Marle, 
III, 598. 


Magnale. Polyptych: Virgin and Saints. 
Execution largely by assistants. 


New Haven, Conn., Yale University, Jarves Collection. Annunciation. 
Empolt, Collegiata. Triptych. 

Assisted. 

Wings of polyptych, 4 saints. 

Predella, 3 scenes. 
Galuzzo (near Florence), Certosa, Chiese Antica. Window of Six Saints. 


Florence, Sta. Felicita, Chapter Hall. Crucifixion. 
(Assisted). 


Florence, Mr. Arthur Acton. St. Anthony, the Abbot. (See S. P. 10). 


Florence, Academy. Polyptych: Madonna and Saints. 
Date inscribed below central panel. 


Vincighata (near Florence), S. Lorenzo. Virgin. 
Attributed by Count Carlo Gamba (Rivista d’arte 1907, 24) to Giov. 
del Biondo. (Fig. 4). 


g2 


Florence, Uffizi, Magazine. Dead Christ. Crucifixion with Brethren of 
the Order of the Flagellanti. Christ the Pilgrim. 
All of the same period. 


1408. Florence, Via Aretina, Tabernacle. Madonna and Saints. 


Dated. Execution largely by assistants. 


1408-9. Florence, Or S. Michele, first pillar right. St. Nicholas. 
Under these two dates are recorded the commission and payments 
for the painting of this saint. 
Trinity. (Fig. 6). 
(Opposite the Trinity), A Saint. 
These are the last works by Niccold known to us. 


Works sy Niccoto pit Pretro Gerini’s IMMEDIATE FoLLowINc. 


1375. Impruneta, Pieve. Entire central section and predella of polyptych on 
high altar. 


Painted by Pietro Nelli and Tommaso del Mazza in 1375 (see 
Vasari, I, 609, n. 3). The central compartment is an adaption of 
Daddi’s Virgin and Angels in his large polyptych now at the Uffizi. 


Florence, S. Ambrogio. Deposition. 


Florence, S. Simone, First altar left. Birth of St. Nicholas. 
Same hand as that which painted a number of female figures in the 
Bigallo and in the Prato frescoes: possibly Baldese. 


S. Stefano in Pane. Virgin in Robbia frame, Close to S. Simone fresco. 
Florence, S. Felice, First altar right, Pietd. 
Florence, S. Felicita. Cappella del Crocefisso. Medallions in ceiling. 


Florence, Academy. Triptych: Crucifixion and Saints. 
Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 624. 


Fiesole, Museo Bandini. Trinity. 

Florence, Bargello. Two Saints. 

Rome, Capitoline Museum. Trinity with Donors. 

Florence, S. Ambrogio. Deposition. 

Fiesole, Museo Bandini. Trinity with Sts. Francis and Magdalen. 


Paris, Louvre. Virgin and Angels. 
Coronation and Angels. 
By same hand. 


New Haven, Conn., Yale University, Jarves Collection. Triptych. 
The Virgin: Very close to lower central compartment of the polyptych 
in the Pieve at Impruneta, and the wings to Lorenzo di Niccolo. 


Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana. Madonna, Two Saints and Angels. (No. 89). 


93 


Florence, Academy. Small Panel with Virgin, Baptist, Saints Lawrence 
James, Anthony, the Abbot, and Six Angels. 


Boston, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy. Madonna, Saints and Angels. 
Parma, Gallery. Dormition. 
Braunschweig, Gemaldegalerie. Virgin and Angels. 


Arezzo, S. Francesco, Chapel to right of choir. Assumption with St. 
Thomas and Other Saints. 
Influence of Agnolo Gaddi in Virgin and type of Mariotto di Nardo 
in some of the saints. 


London, Lord Crawford. Sacred Allegory. 
Published by Tancred Borenius in Burlington Magazine, 1922, 156-8, 
but the work has refinements due to a hand that might easily be an 
assistant’s. 


Florence, Uffizi, Magazine. Four Saints; Two panels representing two 
saints each, 


Florence, S. Felicita, Chapter Hall. Annunciation (2) 
Left transept. Nativity (?). 


Philadelphia, Museum. Madonna and Child. (No. 118) ( Prot.) 
Odd mingling of Gerinesque and Cionesque characters. 


Munich, Dealer. Madonna and Child. 

Florence, Mr. Arthur Acton. Madonna and Child. 
Florentine Market (1926). Small Virgin, Angels, Saints. 
Cambridge (England), Fitzwilliam Museum. Annunciation. 
Southampton (L. I.), Parrish Museum. Virgin and Angels. 
Munich, Alte Pinakothek. The Redeemer. 

Lyons, Musée. Trinity. 


Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana. Virgin, Four Saints, and Two Angels. 
Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 628. 


Florence, Bargello. Small Madonna, Saints and Angels. 


Florence, Palazzo dell Arte della Lana. Coronation in Tabernacle. 
This lunette stands over Jacopo del Casentino’s altarpiece and ap- 
proximates very closely the style of the preceding panel in the Bargello. 


Florence, La Quiete, Conservatorio delle Montalve. Madonna and Two 
Angels. 


94 


NOTES 


me scription given in Rossi e Lasinio, Raccolta de’Pitture antiche intagliate da Paolo Lasinio 
designate da Giuseppe Rossi. Pisa, 1820; and in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 265, note 4; see also ; 
of note I, 267. : 


The “placing of Gerini’s paintings with those of his followers,” in my original list in Arr rv 
America, 1921, 233 et seq., which Van Marle (III, 625) so justly laments, is due to a deplorable 
slip explained in the issue following the one in which the article appeared. 


95 


Mabwnea 


DETAILS FROM THE Parntincs or NiccoLo pi Prerro GERINI 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Entombment. 6. 
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Madonna 7- 
Prato, S. Francesco, Frescoes. 8. 
Empoli, Collegiata, Tripytch. 9. 
Prato, S. Francesco, Frescoes, 10. 


Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Entombment. 
Boston, Gardner Museum, St. Anthony and Angels. 
Pisa, S. Francesco, Frescoes. 

Florence, S. Croce, Crucifix. 

Florence, Mr. Arthur Acton, St, Anthony. 


Fic. 5. Niccoio pi Pierro Gerint: Maponna AND CHILD Fic. 1. Nrccoxo pt Pierro Gerini: Maponna ANnp CuILp 
Collection of Mr. Martin A. Ryerson, Chicago The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 


Fic. 3. Nicco.o pr Pierro Gertni: ENTOMBMENT Fic. 2. Nicco.o pr Prerro Gerini: CRUCcIFIXx 
Academy of Fine Arts, Florence : Church of S. Croce, Florence 


ee a 


& Si ry 
Le, SR ee A ‘ . 
Ce a et 


Ae PRB Pm tne 


ADONNA AND CHILD 


M 


S. Lorenzo in Vincigliata (near Florence) 


Pietro Gerini 


. 


c.4. NuccoLo pi 


Fi 


; TRinrTy 


FLORENCE 


right) 


Fic. 6. Nicco1o pr Prerro GErini 


2 


Or San MicHELe 


(First pillar, 


‘TrRipTycH 


Narpo pi CIoneE: 


Fic. 1 


oldman, New York 


Henry G 


Mr 


Collection of 


NARDO DI CIONE 


A PRECIOUS little triptych (Fig. 1) come some years back into the 
Henry Goldman collection in New York* under Orcagna’s name, 
recalls to one that so much of the fourteenth century still lies in shad- 
ow, and that the most romantic artist of his age, Nardo di Cione, its 
actual painter, still remains one of its most mysterious figures. Sirén’ 
is the only student to have prepared a large enough historical area for 
the building up of his oeuvre, but he ended by heaping up the ground 
with erroneous ascriptions, and by breaking through his outlines into 
those of his greater brother.’ And yet, there seems to be no good reason 
for such a misconception of Nardo, still less for its having held on so 
stubbornly among the professionally learned; especially as his indis- 
putable frescoes* in S. Maria Novella exhibit their own characteris- 
tics, and their divergencies from the altarpiece by Orcagna in the same 
chapel, so decisively.’ 

Until now, Nardo’s single authenticated® work, these frescoes (see 
Fig.g andS. P. 4, 5, 7, 8) remain radical for all further attributions to 
him, as the altarpiece does for all attributions to Orcagna.” Although 
at different times daubed over, and although, as in works of a similar 
scope, so much is due to the hands of assistants, there is enough of an 
evenly high quality to relieve and isolate the guiding genius, and to 
measure the resources of his style. These frescoes display in sharp 
clearness beside Orcagna’s panel (see Figs. 5, 6, 7. A Daddesque Pre- 
della), a plasticity incidental to the description of shape, rather than 
the direct bodying forth of plastic existence. They are instinct with 
a gentler life. The figures in them are suggestive rather than substan- 
tive, and their interest consists largely in what they convey in panto- 
mime. But in shifting our glance from the walls to the altar, we will 
be startled by a vital and amplified sense of physical reality. Or- 
cagna’s figures stand firm and eternal: they are inalienable portions 
of the visible universe like the earth itself, and divine, in their inde- 
pendence of it. More convincing in their organization, in their exist- 
ence, they are expressions of a sharper, less faltering vision, and their 
bulk declares itself forcibly in its space, as if predestined to occupy it, 
and as if the elements themselves could not displace it. The world 
they hint at is deep and undeniable, and contrasts with the world of 


of 


the self-recommending people of Nardo’s frescoes. Orcagna’s persons 
are grave with a contemplative calm, and unlike Nardo’s, who betray 
an inner flutter, Orcagna’s wear an inner composure. These are per- 
fectly self-contained and unconditioned whether by time or space, 
without specific relation to either, and like all godhead, instinct with 
the male principle. But Nardo’s figures, both male and female, are 
feminine in essence, feminine at heart, and he is, therefore, at his best 
when glorifying female beauty, before which he stands in ecstatic 
adoration, and his Paradise is a sort of Dream of Fair Women. 

If the disparity of the genius between the two brothers declares it- 
self in a difference between the formal energy of one and the poetry of 
the other, the antithesis of their style appears in every line. Thus the 
bounding planes and the enclosing contours in Orcagna are less flexible 
and arbitrary than in Nardo, and more final. The shapes are given 
their ultimate form. There is always something hard about them, 
as if they were cut out of an eternal substance, and even the draperies, 
the flesh and the hair have scarcely anything left of their actual texture. 
Orcagna’s individual features, the unwavering glance of the eye and its 
shape, the thick ears, the strong and fine hands, the drapery with its 
straight folds and darting lights, should be confronted with the same 
details in Nardo, for proof of the gap between the two masters. 

Nardo’s painting is essentially suggestive: he is the earliest among 
the Italians to have sought insinuation in expression. This he achieved 
by half hiding the iris between narrowly open lids, which betray only 
a part of its mystery. Full of intimation, it seems to swim languidly 
in its white field, without fixing upon a definite object or specifying a 
practical relation to it. Its meaning is farther complicated by the 
modulations around the eye, which run into the narrow band of shadow 
under it — a shadow that softens its look to languor. ‘The cheek rises 
abruptly below it into a light that models it tightly, and then drops 
gradually to the rounded jaw. The mask thus wins firmness and mo- 
bility at once, and the feline passivity in the supple features, startles 
at times by its Leonardesque suggestion. Nardo, too, modulated his 
expression, only that while in Leonardo, it becomes something disem- 
bodied and luminous, in Nardo it was an undetachable characteriza- 
tion of the flesh and its propensities, its instincts. There is a sense- 
seeking, unfeeling allurement in Nardo’s women, and a profane co- 
quetry, a little cruel, as in Leonardo’s women, but without their ir- 
radiation of inner light. 

The male figures have an odd purring gentleness about them — 


98 


sometimes under a mock-ferocity — as if in such a paradise women, 
_the determining factor of life, imposed the determining character upon 
the species. Even the old men who have a deep hollow running round 
a prominent cheek-bone, with softly rippling beards and long flowing 
locks, manifest rather than a stubborn resistance to decay, only a com- 
plaisant senility. The figures move with a sweeping grace flaunting 
long majestic proportions. 

Certain details in these frescoes are peculiar to their author. The 
hair lies in clear threads against a dark ground, as it was left by the 
passing of the broadly-spaced teeth of a comb. The hands, which sug- 
gest a fastidiousness, are affectedly bent at the wrist, and generally 
relaxed. The fingers are long, slender, at times bony. The draperies 
now hang full and heavy in long soft folds, now break with a sudden, 
capricious sharpness. 

Where the wall carries the original surface, and in the finest of the 
heads chiefly, it reveals a trait of execution more evident in the school 
of the Cioni than elsewhere, and used with more explicit intention by 
Nardo. This is a fine streaking that follows the curvature of the 
planes, designed to tighten them upon the bony mould: a detail of exe- 
cution that shows more clearly in the frescoes than in the panels, but 
found on close examination to have been habitual with him. It should 
be noted along with this dissimilarity between his fresco and tempera 
paintings that there are others, but only such as inhere in the physical 
differences between the two techniques. The minute facture of tem- 
pera produces a crisper definition, a more slippery chiaroscuro, a stiffer, 
more wiry line, a squarer shaping (S. P. 3,9, 10, 11) (and particularly 
in the fingers). The straight level furrows in the male foreheads do not 
look worn into them from within, but rather as if they had been 
slashed with a sharp metal. 

These isolated differentia of the Cappella Strozzi frescoes seen in 
a context of more elusive and incommunicable traits, characterize a 
definite personality endowed with a fancy, a taste and possessing a 
hand, that appear unequivocally, and have been recognized in the fol- 
lowing works: 

1. Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Cloisters. Four Scenes from the Life of 

the Virgin, Two Figures of Saints (frescoes). 
Very largely assisted. 
2. Florence, Badia, Cappella Giochi e Bastari. Scenes of the Passion, 


(frescoes)? 
In both series I see the loose execution of assistants of Nardo’s design, 


very nearly throughout. 


99 


3. Ponte a Mensola (Florence), Collection of Mr. Bernard Berenson. Scene 
from the Life of St. Benedict (fragment of Predella).” 


New York, Historical Society. Large Virgin and Saints." (Fig. 2). 
London, Victoria and Albert Museum. Coronation of the Virgin.” 
Fiesole, Museo Bandini. Crucifixion.” 


me hy gtAbe gt o 


Munich, Alte Pinakotek. Two Panels each containing Five Saints.” 
(Fig. 3). 
Execution due largely to assistants. 


In addition to these I am claiming the following paintings for 
Narpo 
8. New Haven, Yale University, Jarves Collection. Saints John the Baptist 
and Peter.“ (Figs. 4, 5). 


9. London, National Gallery. Saints John the Evangelist, John the Baptist 
and Saint James.” (Fig. 6). 


10. Minneapolis, Mr. Herschel V. Jones. Madonna Standing." (Fig. 7). 

11. New York, Collection of Mr. Henry Goldman. Small Triptych Repre- 
senting the Virgin between Saint Peter and Saint John, the Evangelist.* 
(Fig. 1). 

12. Frankfurt a. M. (Germany), Herr Rudolph Bauer. Crucifixion Repro- 
duced pl. IX, and commented on p. 51 of idee aa eister aus Frankfurter 
Privatbesitz, Frankfurt a. M. 1926. CD. 


I intend this group, which I consider to contain all the works as- 
signable to Nardo, to imply a rejection of all others; and among these 
the rejection of two alone may require some explanation. They are 
two triptychs in Florence, one in the Church of Santa Croce, the 
Madonna with Saints Gregory and Job; the other in the Academy, 
the Trinity between Saints Romuald and John, the Evangelist,” both 
dated 1365, and executed by a contemporary of Nardo, far the ablest 
among his assistants who seems to have had a hand also in the paint- 
ing of the Munich panels.” Here is a master working under the joint 
influence of Nardo and Orcagna, very likely on the latter’s designs or 
ideas, which he does his middling best to conform to. But he is haunted 
besides by Nardo’s romanticism, by Nardo’s types and Nardo’s beauty, 
and there is something of lyricism besides that has tempted Sirén to 
regard them as partly by him. The dryness of expression, however, in 
the male figures, the incomplete articulation, betray the imitator — 
an imitator for all that, if one will stop to examine the predella, with 
enchantments of his own. 

There remain two frescoes in Florence and in New York belonging 
to the Nardesque milieu, still unplaced. A Saint Benedict standing in 


I0O0 


full-length over a small scene from his life is now in the Museum in 
_the Cloisters of the Church of Ognissanti, Florence. I once regarded 
it as by Nardo, and only the most rigidly controlled scrutiny has lately 
convinced me that its crudities are fundamental to another style. 
Nevertheless, it is wholly dependent upon the master. The identity of 
its painter for the present eludes me, though the scene below has more 
than a shop affinity to the predelle of the two paintings just discussed. 

The other is a Christ in life-size (Fig. 8), erect in His tomb, His 
eyes closed in death, and His arms held out diagonally displaying His 
wounds in the open palms. The fresco, now in the Barnard Cloisters in 
New York,” was found by its owner in Florence in a niche, which its 
present site imitates. 

Very close to Nardo, it cannot be associated with any of his known 
and independent followers, and must be by some assistant who was at 
the moment of its painting leaning entirely on him. It adheres slavish- 
ly to Nardo’s formula. The bossy cheek-bones on either side of a rather 
flat nose, the hollows of the eyes, the furrowed forehead, ape the mould 
of Nardo’s masks. The head in general make and pattern resembles 
the Christ bearing the Cross” in the Giochi e Bastari Chapel, in the 
Badia in Florence, and the thumb that tapers above its roots also oc- 
curs there. 

The panels in the Jarves collection (Figs. 4, 5, 7) with which 
Orcagna has been consistently credited are austere, spirited, and in 
style so close to the Historical Society panel that they may be assumed 
to fall into its period. The drapery is of the same stuff and drawn into 
festoon folds as in the Virgin and in the Baptist of The Last Judgment 
in the Strozzi Chapel, and in the lowest figures on the left in The 
Paradise. The structure of the Baptist’s head and neck, reappear in 
the aged Apostle in the lower tier at the extreme left of The Last 
Judgment. His ear recurs in the angel nearest the centre in the fifth 
tier left of the Paradise. The level upper lid, the glance, the inorganic 
modelling appear in the Strozzi Chapel. His long black locks, which 
will be remembered in the Historical Society painting, are to be found 
in the Baptist of the Last Judgment, and in an Apostle seated behind 
him. The rim of St. Peter’s ear painted in a light tone with the inside 
running down to a much lower key, recurs unfailingly in the frescoes 
(S. P. 5, 8), and the whole ear and the left hand are repeated in the 
Evangelist of the Goldman triptych. The hair is sparse and thready as 
in the frescoes, in a way distinguishing for Nardo, and the hands (S. 


IOI 


P. 9, 10) are sharply outlined and articulated as in his acknowledged 
panels. 

The expression of Peter’s face, the emphasis in the gesture, the 
hesitancy in the action, typify the cardinal discrepancies between the 
temperaments of Nardo and his brother. 

One might enumerate as many reasons to dispute the attribution 
of these two panels to Orcagna, as one should have to in order to prove 
them by Nardo, still no demonstration would seem to be conclusive to 
anyone, who cannot see the contrasting calm, command and promise 
of ultimate energy in Orcagna’s figures. In these the movement is 
more decisive and final, because the will and the nerves are uniinpaired, 
and there is also a latent conviction, as in all great art, that gives every 
gesture an air of inevitability. 

The conviction of Nardo’s authorship of the National Gallery 
saints (Fig. 6) can hardly be communicated in bare confrontation. 
They are so deeply impregnated with his genius, that our first glance, 
before it descends to details, should persuade us of it. Their manner 
of standing, with an evasion of direct fall of weight, and the suggestion 
of a lazy, swaying gait, make them look as if they had just stepped out 
of the Paradise. The slit eyes of the St. John, for example, with the 
half-covered iris bound by a well-marked contour, and sharply pointed 
- with a pupil, moving mysteriously behind the level lids, contain the 
same insinuation as the eyes of the sainted ladies in the lower tiers of 
this composition, and in the panels (S. P. 2, 6, 7). They have the same 
flat noses and high rounded cheek bones that sometimes give them the 
air of savages. The third from the right in the bottom row holds her 
book similarly and a little to her right the angel leading the nun by the 
hand is wrapped in draperies that break into the same angular folds. 
The hair of St. John is streaked and falls in hanks down the neck ex- 
actly as — to take one of many instances — in the fourth figure from 
the right in the bottom row of the Paradise. One would have to go to 
other paintings on panel, rather than to fresco, for the finished execu- 
tion of the National Gallery figures, and although one should meet 
with the same full, neatly contoured mouth in almost any youthful 
head in the Paradise, one would find the closest repetition of John’s 
lips, curved, crested and tipped like his, in the Goldman and Jones 
Virgins (S. P. 2,6), and in the Virgin and in the Child of the New York 
Historical Society altarpiece (see Fig. 2). What is true of the St. John 
would hold of the two other saints. 

A Madonna (Fig. 7) not previously recognized, is by all its charac- 


102 


teristics, committed to the same classification. The manner in which 
the outline joins it, and the modelling detaches the figures from the 
gold plane, associates them at once with the Virgin of the Goldman 
Triptych (see Fig. 1). It exceeds the latter somewhat in size (m. .95 x 
.442) and has a lower, softly swelling relief, achieved by a more warmly 
and subtly graduated modelling, upon the typically Nardesque mould 
(S. P. 6, 7). Although there is a heavier languor in the Jones picture, 
with a narrower eye and a gliding glance, the pervasive sentiment is 
the same: the same hands hold an Infant that shows a similar solicitude 
for the Mother.” 

The drapery has the same character, the same hesitantly drawn 
edge and silhouette, and the same features as in the Goldman Virgin. 
The ear shows a hard rim like some of the figures in the Strozzi fres- 
coes (S. P. 5, 8), and the silhouette from ear to shoulder is seen in a 
continuous line as in the Historical Society and in the Goldman pic- 
tures. Over Her head the veil falls into folds as in the Goldman Ma- 
donna (Fig. 7, S. P. 6) exposing the same strands of hair. The mouth 
has the typical small bud-like immaturity, with a sharp arrow-head 
above it (S. P. 5, 6, 7) to which the school of the Cioni likes to give an 
especially sharp angularity. The nose has the daintiness it consistently 
maintains in most of his youthful faces (S. P. 2, 6, 7). Finally the 
stamping of the halos and the borders is identical with those of the 
Goldman picture; with close affinities to the Yale and the National 
Gallery panels. 

More fragile and delicate, more dreamful and remote than any 
other of Nardo’s feminine personages, this Virgin has some of the over- 
charged poetry of a youthful work. Its resemblance, however, to some 
of the female figures in the lower tiers of The Paradise suggest a prox- 
imity in the moments of their painting. 

Of all the panels hitherto attributed to Nardo, the small triptych 
(see Fig. 1) of the Goldman collection is the most happily planned. The 
stamping of the borders and halos, the tooling of the stuffs, the laying 
on of the color, from beginning to end, are of the most finished workman- 
ship, in which sharpness and honesty of execution become a kind of 
preciosity. The figures, in the healthy gem-like solidity of their color, 
stand against a patined and luminous gold, which shines out like the 
tremulous light of early morning. The two flanking saints are turned 
ceremoniously toward the Virgin as if in observance of some divine 
usage, unifying the three leaves in a single symmetry by a composition- 
al scheme similar to Orcagna’s in his polyptych. ‘The draperies gener- 


103 


alize the silhouette, and assimilate them to the architectural plan of the 
whole triptych. In the central compartment which tapers upward in 
a graceful convergence, the Virgin, in larger scale than the two saints, 
conforming to its lines, looms to emphatic dominance; and the hush 
She spreads about Her affects one like a musical pause into which the 
unheard melody continues. The Child, wrapped in gorgeous brocade, 
seems sympathetically absorbed in the Mother’s preoccupation (S. P. 
6), and Her frame, like an attuned instrument, responds sensitively to 
the Child. 

In the pious hush of the action a look of passionate tenderness floats 
up to Her face, as in no other Florentine Virgin earlier than Botticelli, 
and She is sunk in the same dream a hundred years before him. 

But if the mood of the triptych has later affinities, it separates the 
picture from the prevailing contemporary feeling in Florence, which is 
directer and less attenuated through refinements. Even Daddi’s Ma- 
donnas, of all Florentine Madonnas most closely related to those of 
Nardo, seem to live in a far different world. They betray a smaller 
degree of introspection, greater warmth and simpler humanity. In 
Nardo’s world there is no drama, and the action of the people is a 
survival of critical happenings long passed. Everything is in a state 
of lyrical rumination, and lives in a dreamland of wonderful hopes. 
The individual is the object of a fate that detaches him from all actual 
life. 

This lyrical mood in Nardo, with its implications of sensibility, 
is intimately related to the Siense painting of the early Trecento. The 
romanticism, the exquisite acuteness of emotion of Simone Martini 
and his followers enchanted him, as they enchanted all Florentines 
not too deeply rooted in the native genius. In style he is true to the 
Giottesque tradition, but his taste, his sentiment and his allure have 
become Sienized. The most conspicuous and distinguishing trait in 
Nardo, the long slit eye, derives at least in part from Simone. Even 
the unequal scale of a Virgin represented in three-quarters between 
smaller saints in full length—the unique Florentine instance—would 
seem of Sienese origin, and occurs similarly only twice (to my knowl- 
edge) before this: in Duccio’s triptych at the National Gallery in Lon- 
don and in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s polyptych in the Siena Academy. 

The Goldman picture measures 0.75 x 0.66 m. and with the excep- 
tion of the trefoil is in perfect state. The differences between this 
and the Historical Society panel are incidental to discrepancies of 
state, scale and period. The heads of both are similarly constructed 


104 


in light and shade. Both have similar width, similar long narrow 
eyes similarly spaced in it, with the boundaries of the face continuing 
in those of the neck ; the same shadow dividing one from the other. The 
lower lids are underscored with a long, faint shadow. Below it rises 
the cheek-bone with slight depression under it. The fine tapering 
fingers of the Goldman Virgin have grown sparer; but they have re- 
tained the same delicate touch. The Christ’s face is younger and 
plumper, but the hair is streaked identically over the same under 
painting. 

There are other analogies, which if scattered are still telling, such 
as the posture of the right legs in the St. James in London, and the 
Evangelist of the Goldman triptych; and the left edge of the Evan- 
gelist’s drapery in London and the right of the St. Peter in the triptych. 

The Goldman Virgin, however, stands even closer to the female 
figures in the Strozzi Chapel Paradise (Fig. 6). The lurking move- 
ment in her easy posture, the slight yielding tilt of her head, its mould, 
the hair, the flat nose, the dainty budded lips and above them a sharp 
caret joined by two parallels to the nostrils, will be found again and 
again there. But that depth of wistfulness in her glance will not be 
met with until one has reached the Virgin at the top. The contours 
throughout are neither descriptive nor constructive. The artist instead 
generalizes the patterns of the figure to bring them into directer rela- 
tion with their areas and with each other. The lack of explicit plas- 
ticity in the lateral leaves is due to an over-elaboration of the drapery. 
The foreheads, cheek-bones, the noses come forward into light by the 
same gradation and have the same easy way of slipping back into 
shadow as in the heads at the Strozzi chapel. The frown has the same 
fork between the brows; the hair, the identical fall, texture and con- 
sistency. These analogies are specified in the Evangelist of the right 
leaf and in the greybeard in the fourth tier on the right in the Para- 
dise, third from the centre. 

If, now, the four works I have added to the other acceptable ones 
by Nardo, help us to define his vision, his taste, his sentiment, they 
do not lead us into the mystery of his evolution. It is reasonable to 
conjecture that the Strozzi chapel frescoes were painted about the time 
of Orcagna’s polyptych dated 1357, but there is nothing in the relation 
of these two works that could give us a key to the chronological distri- 
bution of the other paintings about them. None of them bears either 
a date or a reliable clue to one. 

Taken together, however, they do release a consistent and distinct 


105 


personal quality. The Berenson and Ognissanti predelle, and the pre- 
delle of the two triptychs of 1365 by a follower, besides give us a peep 
into heavenly landscapes lying under the spell of a magical light, that 
Nardo’s example must originally have inspired. His spacing of figure- 
patterns over romantic settings of rocks and trees, is the most evoca- 
tive in the fourteenth century. 

Nardo’s loveliness, his elegance, make it clear his imagination was 
warmed and caressed by the beauty that may be seen — and by beau- 
ties, as well as by beauty — but here and there, as in the Virgin and the 
Eternal of the Paradise (Fig. 9) there is also a poetic exaltation, which 
sometimes suggests even such a master as Giorgione. 


106 


NE OrlEE eS 


. First published in Arr iv America, April, 1924, 99-112. 
. I, 241-255. 


. Sirén, as will appear below, continues in the error of his predecessors in attributing to Orcagna 


Nardo’s saints in the Jarves collection and at the National Gallery; see Notes 13 and 14. 


. See reproductions in Venturi, V, 761-765, Suida, Tafel, X-XIV, Sirén, II, Pls. 199-202. 


5. There is no published view of Nardo which consistently detaches him from his environment. 


16. 


17. 


: , 18. 
19. 


Cavalcaselle (Ed. Murray), V, misled by Vasari’s attribution of the Strozzi frescoes to Orcagna 
(I, 595) nevertheless, acutely gauged the status of the problem, and cautiously avoided con- 
clusions. Suida (1905, 18-24) was the first to catch the trick of Nardo’s central style, without, 
however, realizing its limits. Venturi (1906, V, 766), with over-cautious temerity rejects indis- 
putable works by Nardo, and classes them with works of his school. Sirén, Giottino; in Giotto 
and Some of His Followers, I, 241-255, begins, as he almost invariably does, on a sound basis, 
but he eventually loses Nardo among his pupils. Van Marle (III, 475-490) begins his section on 
Nardo unfortunately by bestowing upon Orcagna:a share in the painting of The Paradise in the 
Strozzi Chapel, thus betraying his failure to see its harmony of style, and its eternal irrecon- 
cilability with the altarpiece by Orcagna. 


. Ghiberti (ed. Schlosser, I, 40, II, 140), is the most respectable authority for Nardo’s authorship of 


the frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel, but whether it was Nardo or another, my concern in this essay 
would still be primarily to establish a link between a group of works and these frescoes, and their 
stylistic independence of Orcagna’s altarpiece. 


. The Strozzi altarpiece, as Mr. Berenson insisted in the Florentine Painters of the Renaissance 


(1912, 22-23), continues in my opinion the only admissible painting by Orcagna. 


. Suida, op. cit. 20, and Venturi, V, 766. 


. Attributed, following their discovery, to Buffalmaco, by Peleo Bacci in Bollettino d’arte, January, 


1911. Sirén, I, 244-247; II, Pls. 203-204, ascribes them outright to Nardo. 


woirens 1l, Pl. 213. 


. Suida, 21. From the Artaud de Montor Collection (see Catalogue, Paris, 1843, Pl. 7), where it is 


attributed to Guido da Siena, under whose name it still hangs. Reproduced in Sirén, II, Pl. 206. 


. Sirén, I, 251; II, Pl. 208. 
meoiren, 1,252; II, Pl. 209. 
. Sirén, I, 252, Pl. 210. 


. William Rankin (in The American Journal of Archaeology for 1895) attributes these to Orcagna, 


and is followed by Sirén (Catalogue of the Jarves Collection, Yale University Press, 1916, 40) 
and by Van Marle (III, 468). See Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, 1926, 16. 


Sirén (I, 222) attributes these figures to Orcagna; Van Marle (III, 509-511) ascribes them to a 
heterogeneous personality he styles Compagno dell’ Orcagna. 


This was very probably the Madonna formerly in the Bergolli collection, and when there at- 
tributed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to Giovanni da Milano (see Venturi, V, 915). It has since 
hung in the Tucher Collection, Vienna, under the designation of the Florentine School, from which 
it passed in the fall of 1925 to a New York dealer, and finally (1926) to Mr. Jones. 


First published in Arr rn AmerIcA, 1924, 99-112. 
Suida, 44, attributes these two altarpieces to an Allegretto Nuzi (not to be confused with the 
painter of Fabriano); Sirén (I, 253-4; II, Pls. 211, 212) to Nardo. 


107 


nse apie hora isd in 


22. These cloisters and the contents passed in 
of Art 


23. See Van Marle, III, 483. 5508 


24. Instances of same motif occur frequently in Daddi bee oe in ! 
and ina beautiful Madonna Sree to Mr. fost eae re 


108 


ont 
o 


ee 


DerTAILs FROM THE Paintincs oF NARDO DI CIONE 


Florence, S. Maria Novella, The Paradise. 
Florence, S. Maria Novella, The Paradise. 
New Haven, Yale University, St. Peter. 
New Haven, Yale University, St. Peter. 
London, National Gallery, Three Saints. 


New York Historical Society, Altarpiece. 
London, National Gallery, Three Saints. 
Fiesole, Museo Bandini, Crucifixion. 
Florence, S. Maria Novella, The Paradise. 
Florence, §. Maria Novella, The Paradise. 
New York, Mr. Henry Goldman, Triptych. 


Sgr 
= — 


Fic. 4. Narpo pr Crone: Fic. 5. Narpo pi Crone: Fic. 2. Narpo pi Crone: Vircin 
St. Joun, THE Baptist St. PETER AND CHILD FROM ALTARPIECE 


Yale University, New Haven Yale University, New Haven Historical Society, New York 


rai « 
i RRR es 


we 
x tt Ped #a 


Ge TT, 
in RY, zx 

Roe 

— 


SAINTS 


Ss: 


ASSISTANT 


Narpvo pi CIonE AND 


ae 


Fic. 


Alte Pinakotek, Munich 


oie 


Firg.06: 


Naxpo pi CIoNE 


“a 


ogee 


Ap 


ae ae a 


“a 


Pk ee of Se 


; SS. Joun, THE Evancetist, Joun, 
National Gallery, London 


THE 


Baptist, AND JAMES 


t 
&.! 
y 
Ny 
Ki 
| 
\ 
. 
& 
& 
N 
N 
® 
¢. 
S 
& 
& 
. 
& 
N 
& 


Fic. 7. Narpo pi Cione: Vircin AnD CHILD 
Mr. Herschel V. Jones, Minneapolis 


. 
eid -d w! . ~ 7 
- =. “ ~ - . we err eke F al 1) Ping, ny Cal - 
& - 5 “ - + ° — ” re wits — tre a a ; 
, a re 3 Pan Saat ct Mae Ae = ‘ ad ee ie +4 Thee aa ay 2- eS Tae camry yi Sontad ie - 
° , ; \ uggs tot ee pe ARG Spek es a henge andy Sig av Ta) pe ee oat : “ ‘.- 
r ad ~ (eee eT a ie) 2 . t = 
: "i - adhe Sie oe = ’ * — 
; ie a eee, “e- Lag 5 ~- & ia 
ale “~ ie oe ies ' a 
. a ; 7 
_ 


nage oe 

* Aged ieties or oie 

pht, and tress .vetim. 

4. But as the figurws a® | 
das (gy Davee Wwah fOetacwoT ra Eiljottes rd 
| bp fantastinneae A sb ores 

, the extensiver) ieee , 


and th e the frescurs & the Hepes 
Soa Phase ce thee Vee ed Cues | 
Hon ¢ i the Fa 2: theese on the wa 
us the Obd Tova ae | 
a ask divas at @ Parrdise sredette 
in Fhe Stransi Chapel ia & Mar. Sere 
ol ng, which is the mest preter. rile Beet oe 
, the narrative moves with sdnaelenid yes 
it 
: intains the surface: the figures, maxtritei rane 
the foreground, and the landscape, ave adibing. yar sg 

yertically, so that the action reads againet i ae age sat @ 
‘The persons are few in number, and the setting gives just 
ager objects to characterize the site of the action. Lo 
y universe there is as yet no naturalistic unity, only « 
Aubeh has the effect of something stealing upon you, like _ 
which he background i ig a low accompaniment. There s ac- 
. al relation between the space amd the light, which, 
teat mn ep how to shine, favors the figures alkume, and ileal all 
rd beyond (th dirknens)s 
neoethod of presentation, without plaatie | aalionces, without 


5 is i tr ees 
aes os / Citak 
Pav we 
By wey a : ao iis : 
> , ‘ 
ae SS 
ey A, on 


NICCOLO DI TOMMASO'* AND THE 
RINUCCINI MASTER’ 


N the idle bustle of provincial Pistoia, among the sober refinements 

of its Romanesque, stands a dwelling-house that was once a mon- 
astery.’ Its outer walls still affirm an ancient origin, but the inside 
has since been cut up into modest apartments; and as you climb the 
steep and dingy stairs, traces of old fresco greet you. They prepare 
you for the flowering of the upper walls and the vaults, which a wide 
modern daylight surprises. Nothing could be more unexpected in such 
a place, and yet nothing so well suits its ineradicable genius! 

At first a rosy pallor dawns on your delighted attention, a color that 
rises with the light, and breaks overhead into contrast with the dark- 
ened background. But as the figures are neither massive nor animated, 
nor so grouped as to force your eye, before you have looked at them 
closely, they make a fantastic arabesque over the surface. 

Of all that is left, the extensively legible parts alone can serve our 
purpose, and they are the frescoes in the uppermost rooms on the nar- 
row side of the building. Those of the vaulted ceiling* represent scenes 
from the Creation and the Fall; those on the walls just under it, 
small episodes from the Old Testament, from the lives of the Virgin 
and other saints; and a fragment of a Paradise modelled on Nardo’s 
Paradise in the Strozzi Chapel in S. Maria Novella. 

In the ceiling, which is the most pretentious part of the surviving 
decoration, the narrative moves with absorbed gravity. Everything 
jealously maintains the surface: the figures, modelled summarily, are 
pushed into the foreground, and the landscape, avoiding perspective, is 
tipped up vertically, so that the action reads against it as against a 
backdrop. The persons are few in number, and the setting gives just 
enough in individual objects to characterize the site of the action. In 
this rudimentary universe there is as yet no naturalistic unity, only a 
unity of mood, which has the effect of something stealing upon you, like 
music, to which the background is a low accompaniment. There is ac- 
cordingly no actual relation between the space and the light, which, 
only just learning how to shine, favors the figures alone, and leaves all 
the world beyond in darkness. 

Such a method of presentation, without plastic saliences, without 


109 


recessions, is rewarded for its respect of the level wall, by producing a 
sense of decorative justice. 

To an innocent modern taste there may be small plausibility in this 
Paradise of our painter. It wants, certainly, in its boasted benefits, and 
offers too little compensation for rejections in this world, to make it its 
dangerous rival in our preferences. Besides, it allows too narrow a 
range to the modern romantic fancy. It must not be forgotten, how- 
ever, that a fourteenth century representation of Paradise was deter- 
mined by the undeniable and undisputed conventions both of contem- 
porary Weltanschaung and of contemporary art, which we have been 
centuries breaking down. Unlike our Paradise of rapturous extensions 
of earthly freedom, of perpetual surprises, of infinite ease, and healing 
calm, our painter’s Paradise was, in its simple intention, a supreme 
opportunity for amorous longings. Rock-bound, bare, it is soft and 
leafy only for the Fall (Fig. 1). The Serpent has the head of a com- 
plaisant and furthering procuress, and Adam and Eve are all-forgetful 
in their desire. How harsh and unsparing seems the final Expulsion 
of such gentle and trusting children of nature! 

The first of the scenes illustrating Genesis, in the quadripartite ceil- 
ing, the Creation of the Beasts, imitates the formula of the traditional 
representation of Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds, and in fact, 
judging from their share of the space these would seem also the Cre- 
ator’s favorites; the other animals are crowded into subordinate posi- 
tions, and we see them all under the divine spell, pert and orderly like a 
class of pupils impatient to please a beloved master. The Creator, full 
of appropriate grace, rewards them with a blessing. 

In the next compartment (Fig. 2), Eve, firm-breasted and languor- 
ous, pauses at her shuttle, and looks yearningly towards Adam, who is 
breaking the ground with a hoe. Although the action is of an idyllic 
mood, the barren rocks around them, surrounded by a murky void, be- 
speaks a primeval and shelterless solitude. 

But the scene changes in the Fall, where a diapered background 
of small leaves and flowers spreads like a mille-feuille behind the fig- 
ures. Standing like Aphrodite before the dazed Paris in fifteenth cen- 
tury representations of The Award of the Golden Apple, Eve seems to 
have risen from the earth, on tall and slender limbs, chastened in shape 
like a Greek jar, and displays the miracle of her pearl-tinted body as 
she offers it in the symbolic apple: Adam accepts it, as if to maintain 
a dramatic as well as the merely physical symmetry. 

Here, as elsewhere, there are no psychological distinctions, and the 


IIo 


action sustains an evenness of mood that characterizes the whole of the 
narrative, even where it would require sudden or violent outbreaks of 
feeling. Discovered in hiding after the Sin, Adam and Eve conduct 
themselves as if unaccustomed to such unsettling crises, and the in- 
exorable Dispenser of retributive justice seems mild for the thunderous 
Jehovah of the bible narrative. Nor again is there anything seriously 
disorganizing in their grief when they are finally driven out of Eden. 
We accord their tears and their distress the sort of mock pity we as- 
sume for children in their make-believe. 

Our painter ignores the possible consequences of action and its 
moral implications, in his concern with the poetic illusion. He appears 
at his best, accordingly, when he shows the Blessed standing before the 
Eternal and the Virgin in the fragment of his Paradise, where no 
action, only a sort of trusting expectancy is required of them. 

In the smaller scenes the narrative runs more briskly among pro- 
fane familiarities he felt much more at home in, than in the solemn 
events of the ceiling. The increase in freedom of treatment and in- 
formality of action in the smaller representations, corresponds to the 
differences between the body of the devotional altarpiece and its pre- 
della. The differences in style— and they are slight enough — are 
only such as one would find in works as discrepant in scale. 

But the shapes, the types, the line, the look are identical in all the 
frescoes ; they lie in the same context — a context of characters more 
elusive to language than these — and point to the same guiding, if not 
actually painting, hand.’ 

The heads (S. P. 1, 3, 5, 7, 10) are predominately short and square, 
with long eyes occupying almost the entire width. The lower lid runs 
into the narrow band of shadow under it. The large iris cut by a level 
lid, leaves only a tip of white visible, as in Nardo di Cione, and the look 
of immersed, lingering feeling — always determining to the expression 
of the head — is of the same kind of evocation as Nardo’s. The crow’s- 
feet, which leave their imprint indiscriminately upon all of Niccolo’s 
faces are drawn in parallel furrows — varying in number with the stage 
of life — from the eye across the temple (S. P. 5, 7). The heads of the 
old men receive an additional fold in the upper and lower lids, a prom- 
inent cheek-bone and shrunken hollows under them. 

The individual filaments of the hair are drawn in parallels over a 
dark ground (S. P. 1, 2, 3, 6) very much as in the lower frescoes of the 
Rinuccini Chapel. The fingers are bony, sharp-jointed, with a sudden 
hook-like break in the contour, and sometimes flattened at the ends. 


III 


The nose is generally wide, and its outline forms an acute angle at the 
bottom where it joins the face. The light that goes down the ridge forks 
at the tip in a manner that recurs at times in the knuckles. Not being 
an expressional factor, the ear is flimsily constructed of a warped rim 
around a loose concavity. The draperies of a heavy stuff hang free, 
generalizing the mass of the figure rather than revealing its structure. 
The edge often folds over below the neck to make a sort of a flap. 

It is evident from a glance that the temperament of our master dom- 
inates his vision. Without ever being directly expressive, his painting 
induces a mood by means of a chiaroscuro diffused in a pictorial effect, 
never concentrated in plastic form. To this end the heavy contours, 
inner and outer, block out the figure generally, and the modelling, once 
it has given a statement of the bulk, becomes a means of softening the 
forms and qualifying the meaning of the features. 

Narrow in their range of expression, everywhere keeping close to 
their radical type, these frescoes so plainly resemble each other in every 
detail as to separate themselves easily from other works of the school, 
and to furnish an obvious link by which to join other paintings by the 
same hand. 

Of these, the one bearing the closest relation to the frescoes, is a 
small Coronation at the Academy in Florence (Fig. 3. S. P. 6), there 
attributed to Giovanni da Milano. Indeed, the genius of the ceiling 
seems to have descended to this delicately poetic picture. It shows a 
type of vertical arrangement first made fashionable by Nardo’s Para- 
dise, and lasting down to Angelico. From the kneeling angels below, 
and the female saints beside them, who consolidate the centre of the 
composition, the figures rise with graceful dignity on both sides towards 
the tall throne, spread with a gorgeous, daintily-figured brocade, before 
which the sacrament is being solemnized. The pictorial treatment may 
not at the first glance seem to possess the same radical character as the 
frescoes of the monastery ceiling. But the kind of disparity that exists 
between the two, accords with the rule that Italian pictures on a small 
scale are freer and broader in execution than monumental paintings. 
The opalescence and the loose heavy contours together ought to suffice 
to join this difference in a common origin, however. Notice further 
that the schematization of the hair and the exposure of the ear recur 
here exactly as in the monastery vault. Finally the head of the Virgin 
repeats the head of the Serpent and is a reversal of the head of the Eve 
in the Fall in the ceiling (S. P. 6, 1, 3). The shape and look of the large 
iris which covers almost the entire eye, the nose sharply lighted at the 


112 


tip, the cheek, are identical in all of these. The shorter squarer heads 
at the sides will surprise no one who recalls the Paradise in the Con- 
vento del T. 

A small picture, a triptych in the Walters Collection in Baltimore 
(no. 718, and attributed to Giovanni da Milano), representing the same 
subject in the central compartment, exhibits the same points of re- 
semblance to the frescoes. The angels, however, maintain the formula 
of those in the Naples altarpiece, discussed below, so consistently, as to 
make it probable the triptych was painted later than the Academy pic- 
ture, very likely around 1370. 

Another picture (Fig. 4) that joins the frescoes, and by liens more 
obvious still, because of its scale, is a St. James in the collection of Mr. 
Maitland F. Griggs.* The panel, presumably cut down, shows an in- 
tact figure, which is compensated for having had the gold round it 
scraped by the mellowness of its patined enamel. 

The type and bearing of the figure are of an inveterate aristocracy. 
There is a slow, vertical swing in the movement that suggests a stalking 
gait, which conforms with the dreamy absorption of the head. ‘The some- 
what mannered refinement may be expected of the painter of the Cre- 
ator and of Eve, the Temptress (S. P. 2, 10), in the ceiling of the Con- 
vento del T. That same low roundness of relief will be found again in 
the Paradise; the steeped look and the schematized hair exposing the 
same ear, appear in the Eve at the shuttle, and the wide nose terminates 
below at the sides in the same sharp wings as evident chiefly in The 
Temptation, and the Academy Coronation (S. P. 2, 1, 10, 6). The 
right hand is bony and heavily outlined, with the joints bent as — con- 
spicuously —in the scenes of The Creation and The Fall (S. P. 9, 8, 
10). The thumb of the left hand repeats the thumb of the same saint 
among the Blessed, and the ear is one of many variants of a type that 
recurs everywhere in the vault of the monastery (S. P. 2, 1, 10). 

Two saints in the Horne Foundation, in Florence (Nos. 75, 76, 
Sala terza) a St. John, the Evangelist (Figs. 5,7), and a St. Paul (Fig. 
6), by the author of the frescoes, were attributed by their former owner, 
Herbert Horne, to Giovanni da Milano, a designation superseded in 
the recent catalogue (1921) by that of “prossimi ad Andrea da Firenze.” 

The excellent state of these panels reveals a modelling that is firm- 
er, and an enamel harder, than in any of the other paintings by the same 
master. Here the light pink and light blue draperies, that occur in the 
work of no other artist, repeat the color, hang, texture, weight and con- 
sistency of the drapery in the Paradise, and in the vault of the Con- 


ic 


vento del T. The draperies of St. John, the Evangelist, closely imitate 
those of the Almighty in the Creation of the Beasts, and break the same 
way against the ground. 

The wistfulness of the glance carries you back to the St. James, in 
Mr. Griggs’ collection, with whom the Evangelist has profound affini- 
ties (see Fig. S. P. 2). Fortuitous differences apart, the hair obeys the 
same formula, the same large iris gives the same heavy look to the eye, 
only the Evangelist’s age has left more numerous and deeper furrows 
around them. The same nose shows the same width, the same angle 
where it joins the cheek at the bottom, the same double light at the tip; 
and the right hand of St. John displays the angularities to be found in 
the right of St. James. St. John’s hollow-cheeked type will be found 
among the greybeards in our master’s Paradise. Lastly, the heavy con- 
tours profess the same hand throughout. 

The St. Paul (Fig. 6, S. P. 4), which belongs to the same original 
dismembered polyptych, shares all these affinities. 

To the same period in the activity of our master may be assigned three 
panels, united in a group by identity of theme, almost exact correspond- 
ence of representation as well as by analogies of style. They area pretty 
Nativity (Fig. 8) in the Vatican Gallery, a triptych (Fig.9) in the John- 
son Collection, in Philadelphia (with a Nativity in the central com- 
partment), and a Nativity in the collection of Mr. Maitland F. Griggs. 
Of the three, the Vatican" panel has a crispness and a freshness that 
fade in the other two, and that should help to determine the order of 
their painting. But whatever their order, there are features, in the 
mode of representation, which distinguish the panels from all others 
dealing with the same theme— and, with possibly a single exception, 
profess the same hand. 

They all show the Virgin and Child before a large almond-shaped 
aura, the former to the left, Joseph to the right of the centre, in almost 
symmetrical arrangement, before an open grotto. The upper portion of 
the panel is alive with angels, turned toward Christ in the centre; and 
in the Johnson and Vatican panels there are the uncommon features 
of words issuing from the mouths of some of the personages, and the 
names of the more important saints in Gothic uncials in the halos. 

But if these three panels are drawn together by common motifs, 
they are assimilated into our painter’s oeuvre by disclosing all the 
traits and tricks witnessed in the review of his other works. 

The mood of the representations, as of the single figures, has the 
blandness and prettiness of the Ceiling. 


114 


In the Nativity of the Vatican Gallery (Fig. 8) you will find the 
prominent contours, the soft eye, the small ear, the broadly spaced 
hair, the cloven high-lights. But while the drawing is misleadingly 
looser, and the shaping and execution more perfunctory, and the con- 
tent less poetic than in other of our painter’s works, the St. Joseph re- 
peats a habitual formula, and more completely betrays than any other 
portion of the picture, the hand that carried it out. His head occurred 
already in the Paradise of the Convento del T in the aged saint (S. 
P. 5) whose face has his hollows, his straight sharp-edged lids, his nose, 
his ear, and straggling tendrils in the beard. Joseph’s eye has the Nar- 
desque shadow under it — that has the same suggestions as in the head 
of Eve (S. P. 3) — and his hands and drapery, the haphazard outlines of 
the frescoes. Among the panels by this master, Joseph’s head parallels 
that of the St. John in the Horne Foundation (See Fig. 7). 

Whereas the triptych of the Johnson Collection® (Fig. 9) bears 
signs of the same authorship as the Vatican panel, these signs do not as 
quickly unite in the same total meaning to the determination of the 
same personality. That is due, in part at least, to the admixture of 
other hands— modern as well as ancient—but chiefly to the slack- 
ness of the painter’s advancing years. So that while the execution ex- 
hibits a smoother finish than is natural in our master, such an im- 
pression leaves everywhere a residue of characters that establishes his 
predominant share. 

With these qualifications the figures of the Nativity in the central 
leaf of the triptych will join themselves as closely to the earlier works 
of this master as to the corresponding figures in the Vatican panel, 
by the hollow-cheeked faces and knotted fingers of the old men, the 
thread-like hair, the hook-like ears, the steeped glance, and the slender 
bodies. 

These details, however, will testify more eloquently to the author- 
ship of their painter when we compare the Virgin’s head to Eve in the 
Fall (S. P. 10) ; the St. James in the left wing (with his long face, his 
silhouette, his high-placed ear, his hair, his spare beard) with the same 
saint (see Fig. 4) belonging to Mr. Griggs; or the St. Anthony, the 
Abbot, with the same figure in Naples (see Figs. 10, 11)—-where the 
mould, the beard, the nose, the furrows recur—or the angels, and the 
Annunciate with the heads of the Florentine Coronation (see Fig. 3). 

The third of these panels in the Collection of Mr. Maitland F. 
Griggs has lost too much of its original surface to furnish definite ad- 
vantage to the demonstration. ‘The design and the grace of the figures, 


115 


the drapery, the rock-shapes declare the same taste and genius —al- 
though the condition of the panel, which has been reduced to the 
preparation and underpainting, suggests the possibility, that these were 
carried out by assistants before the panel reached the hands of the 
master. 

Not far behind these works, come four gentle saints that having 
been separated from the lost central panel containing a Madonna, 
are now in the store-room of the Vatican Gallery (n. 201). The com- 
partment that originally stood left of the Virgin with SS. Julian and 
Lucy, displays first of all, the same halos as in the Nativity (in the same 
Gallery), and a brocade, which although patterned, is streaked like the 
floor of this picture. 

The hair, the high ear and the hands of the St. Lucy imitate those 
of the Temptation (S. P. 10), while the left hand of Julian with its 
knottiness and double lights, is a looser and swifter rendering of the 
prototype of such hands, as those of the Horne Evangelist, e.g. (see 
high): 

There remains one other work by the same hand as the foregoing 
—a painting to which the Horne St. John (see Figs. 5, 7) bears closer 
correspondencies than any other, and which is in Naples in the church 
of S. Antonio Abbate. It is a triptych” (Fig. 10), flanked by Sts. 
Francis and Peter, left, and Sts. John, the Evangelist, and Louis of 
Toulouse, right. Though dismembered, each of the leaves of the altar- 
piece is on the original site. But a fate almost as hard as loss has be- 
fallen it: for there is no violence of which humanity, in its abject wan- 
tonness is capable, that has not spent itself on this defenceless panel, 
and all the fatuity of modern renovation has completed the work of 
destruction. In replacing the gold, the restorer has marred the out- 
lines, and the halos have been outrageously daubed over. At present 
the surface is flaking away, with no pious hand to stay its utter ruin. 

But while the malice of man and of time have done their worst, the few 
well-preserved parts do honor to the soundness of the classic technique. 
By a lucky chance the figure of St. John, the Evangelist, which the 
Horne St. John (see Figs. 5, 7) most closely resembles, is among those 
injured least. 

It will be seen at once — allowing first for the discrepancy of 
state of the two panels —that the structure, types and drawing of the 
two figures are radically the same. The heads have the identical make, 
the Horne head, like the whole figure, being more tightly knit and more 
emphatic in treatment. It would seem, accordingly, of an earlier 


116 


fruiting. The hollow cheeks alike in both, show the same hair starting 
from them. The upper lid cuts the same spreading iris in the eyes of 
both figures, and puts a look of vague and detached absorption into 
them. At the lower end of the nose the heavy outline forms the same 
shallow angles; two vertical lights mark the tip; and two horizontal 
ones, the knuckles of the right hand, which is forged of the same sub- 
stance, and bound by the same brittle line. The left hands differ from 
the right in both figures in the same way, and coincide among them- 
selves in shape and character. They lie similarly under their burdens, 
and the fingers bend sharply, spread and flatten under the nails at the 
tips. The drapery, which discloses the same white through its thin 
paint, is identical in color with that of the Horne saints, breaks into the 
same folds, and wraps the figure in the same way. 

One might subject the St. Paul in the Horne Foundation (Fig. 6) 
to the same demonstration, and pile up evidence by pointing out that 
the head of St. Anthony (Fig. 11) furnishes another instance of inti- 
mate resemblance to the Horne Evangelist (Fig. 7) ; but it will prove 
more profitable to note that the cusped arch of the Horne panels re- 
peats that of the central panel in Naples. 

If, as I am assuming, all these works exhibit a radical rhythm, a 
taste, types, shapes, style peculiar to a single personality, then they 
would all have been painted by the hand that painted the Naples 
triptych. This, as it happens, bears an inscription at the base of the 
throne which discloses the name of the artist and the date of its paint- 
ing, and runs thus:” 


A. MCCCLXXI NICHOLAUS TOMASI 
DE FLORE PICTO 


The Naples triptych would accordingly bestow the name of its 
painter on the frescoes of the Convento del T,, on the Academy Cor- 
onation, the Walters triptych, Mr. Griggs’ St. James, and small Nativ- 
ity, the two Saints of the Horne Foundation, the Nativity and the four 
Saints at the Vatican, the Johnson tabernacle; which between them 
yield a sense of a coherent artistic complex, as it exercises itself in the 
various forms of fresco, monumental and small painting. 

It may be less simple, because of wanting evidence, to speculate on 
the sequence of the individual works in this series, or on the length of 
the gaps between them. Happily, with the aid of temperate conjecture, 
however, and a sparse scattering of data, one might reach some likely 


117 


notion of the relative chronological position of our master’s activity, 
and possibly even of some of his works. 

Sacchetti, in his facetious account of a banquet of artists at San 
Miniato, mentions a Niccolo di Tommaso along with Orcagna and 
Taddeo Gaddi. If this be our painter, as some have supposed, then he 
might be considered a contemporary of these two masters. Again, a 
Niccolo di Tommaso who may be our painter is among the earliest reg- 
istrations in the Guild of St. Luke, founded in 1339.” On these grounds, 
such as they are, one might, tentatively assume that he was a mature 
artist at that date, and probably not under twenty-five years of age. 
On the other hand, he cannot have been much over thirty, if he painted 
the Naples polyptych as late as 1371, which shows him already in an 
advanced, though not yet, declining maturity. His activity as a painter 
might, therefore, have begun around 1330. If it did, then none of his 
earlier works has yet been identified. All those I attribute to him would 
seem to fall into the third quarter of the Trecento. And oddly enough, 
the two documents bearing on him, are of the same period, that is of the 
years 1365 and 1366. Their contents imply middle life and a settled 
reputation at the time of their drawing up. In 1365" he is a witness at 
the proving of the will of Nardo di Cione. Under the following year, 
1366, he is recorded with Orcagna — among others — in a list of art- 
ists consulted by the Operai del Duomo. 

And the stylistic relation of Niccolo’s works to others of his school 
force them into the same chronological position. Taken in a body, 
they represent a continuation of Nardo’s style, as we know Nardo 
about the middle of the century; a stage that cannot be far removed 
from the painting of the frescoes by Giovanni da Milano and his Nar- 
desque associate in the Rinuccini Chapel, about 1370. A contem- 
porary, a younger contemporary, if his juniority may be surmised on 
the basis of his derivation from Nardo, his entire artistic vocabulary is 
appropriated from him. The types, the lazy postures, the cut and look 
of the eye, the bony hand, the split light, repeat Nardo’s forms and 
spirit so closely and so consistently, that they must have become rooted 
in him from a tender and early discipleship under him. And yet, while 
Nardo’s style arose in response to an original vision, and therefore, 
always shares and reflects its endless self-renewal, Niccold’s style is the 
result of habitual repetition of Nardo’s stock of images; and in the 
natural effort to seize and to hold them, the hand obeying the mind, 
rendered them in a heavy schematized contour. In its simplifying, 
summarizing, mnemonic effort, it reduced the forms of Nardo’s free 


118 


and fluid expression to diagram, and so the hair of Nardo and the 
wrinkles become parallelized, the articulation of the fingers, over-ac- 
cented, while the larger representative units are seen less as incidents 
in a harmonized and infinitely varied system of nature—which in 
Nardo they also reveal—than as abbreviations of nature accommo- 
dated to a decorative vision. 

But these assimilations from Nardo, and Niccolo’s dependence on 
him, express a deeper temperamental affinity between master and pupil. 
Both possess a tendency to sink the action in a pervading mood, and 
each object, as in a piece of still-life, becomes steeped in a life beyond 
itself, the life of its suggestions and associations. ‘This poetic factor in 
Niccolo’s paintings, in a stylistic context so explicitly Nardesque, urges 
the conclusion that only Nardo’s example could be responsible for it. 

With this dependence once admitted, there still remains a quality 
in Niccolo’s painting which, if wanting in original genius, yields a 
unique savor and makes him an extraordinary figure among his con- 
temporaries. In an age when art was not a personal but a traditional 
expression, Niccolo, pursuing a path struck by his master, evolves an 
art that draws on intimate experience. His painting is neither deter- 
mined to an idea, nor does it liberate a direct force; his figures release 
a mood, and spread an atmosphere about themselves. They have their 
being in an ante-motor world, in which the monotonous bliss of life has 
not yet felt the vehemence of the heart, nor reached the light of full 
consciousness. In a final reckoning, it is an ingenuous insinuating but 
unevolved expression, still in the stage of the protoplasmic dream, 
dumbly shaping its half-formed images. How inaccessible and unreal 
the Giottesque idealism of his day must have seemed to this provincial 
little Florentine, whose only reality was the drifting state of the feel- 

ings and the instincts! 


Niccold’s large inheritance from Nardo has been responsible for the 
confusion of Niccold’s works with those of Nardo’s other artistic heirs 
and artistic kin. We have seen that the greater part of Niccolo’s pan- 
els, were attributed to Giovanni da Milano. This is due first of all to 
general appropriations of sentiment and atmosphere (see Fig. 12), 
then, to the fact that Niccolo took over from Nardo, along with other 
traits, some that are of Sienese origin, there being a good deal that is 
ultimately Sienese in Giovanni. There is, besides, evidence of Nardo 
and Giovanni having borrowed something from each other. But there 
is a more specific reason for the confusion. Niccolo’s panels, which are 


119 


strongly Nardesque, resemble the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel, 
painted by a pupil of Nardo’s,” but often incautiously assumed to be 
by the painter (or his assistant) of the upper tiers.” With these, con- 
temporary evidence credits Giovanni da Milano. But the analogies of 
the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel to Nardo are so much deeper 
than the analogies between these and Giovanni’s frescoes in the same 
place, that the difference in degree of analogy alone, would establish 
not only two distinct hands, but hands of radically distinct derivation. 
Suida,” whose eye would not be deceived, saw this difference of style 
clearly enough, but because he saw not beyond it, attributed the lower 
frescoes, with evasive caution, to an assistant of Giovanni’s, without 
further qualifications. 

It had escaped him that the significant fact about this painter of 
the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel, is not the fortuitous one that 
he helped Giovanni, but rather that he was an autonomous master, 
intrinsically independent of him. Giovani, it must be remembered, 
was a foreigner, with a foreign manner and a foreign accent ; the painter 
of the lowest tier was, on the contrary, formed on indigenous Florentine 
traditions. Now Giovanni’s painting in the Chapel was first surmised 
by Cavalcaselle,”* and authenticated by the later discovery” of an agree- 
ment between Giovanni and the captains of Or San Michele dated 
1365; but 1366” marks the last occasion on which he is documentarily 
cited in Florence, and not impossibly also his breaking off at the lowest 
tier, either because of non-fulfilment of the difficult terms of the con- 
tract, or because of his desire to be bound by another.” 

If the master who undertook to complete the series was of different 
affinities and character, his share of it on the other hand, reveals that 
he pledged himself to carry the painting forward so far as possible on 
Giovanni’s plans, and what is clearer still, in Giovanni’s palette. It is 
this adherence to Giovanni’s color that has been deluding most eyes. 
But leaving the color for the present out of our reckoning, notice how 
wide the disparity between the two styles really is. 

Giovanni’s figures (Fig. 13) are organized to a rhythmic coherence 
on the flat from left to right by the flowing lines of their clean-edged 
patterns. Such organization implies a direct scale-relation of these to 
the area and its limits. Every object is in the compositional system 
and becomes a directly operative factor in it. 

But the figures are at the same time organized in depth —in a way 
that reveals depth and surface to be correlated manifestations of the 
same organizing principle. Everything is further harmonized by a 


I20 


fluid and binding chiaroscuro, by a physical atmosphere, by a poetic 
and sensitive vision which is of a different racial quality than that of 
his Florentine successor. In this atmosphere, the individual figure — 
of the texture and consistency of which Giovanni had a northern sense 
—1is modulated to a soft, swelling plasticity, which together with the 
line, liberates it from the mere heaviness of mass. 

Such a way of seeing is radically diverse from that of the master 
who finished the Rinuccini cycle” (Fig. 14). In his share of the fres- 
coes there is by contrast, a rude heaviness of bulk, a modelling that al- 
ways uncovers the raw saliences of the figure, but never becomes quali- 
tative. No linear melody unites the elements of the surface; in fact 
there is no such linealistic consciousness in this painter, as in the 
Sienizing Giovanni, and none of his optical sensibility. The action, 
which in Giovanni’s frescoes moves with an ideal dramatic progression, 
becomes in the lowest tier, scattered and manifold, to produce the il- 
lusion of a fullness and variety of life. There is no gradation of ac- 
cents, and no swiftly seizable relief of its determinants in an ideally 
unified action as in Giovanni, whose poetry is here replaced by an _ 
austere, somewhat crabbed prose. Passing from the upper to the low- 
est tiers, the total effect is starkly realistic. 

Such disparities between Giovanni and the painter of the lowest 
tier, might lead one to expect no link of kinship between the latter and 
Niccolo di Tommaso; and it must be admitted that temperamentally 
Niccolo stands closer to Giovanni da Milano, and that he was pro- 
foundly influenced by him. Niccold’s imagination and optical vision 
as well owe a great deal to the north Italian master, but his manual 
habits are as profoundly Florentine, and join him by close stylistic 
analogies to the master of the lowest tier. 

These analogies fix, beyond any question, their common origin 
in Nardo. Leaving for the moment Niccold’s affinities to Giovanni 
aside, there is indisputable evidence of this in the radical types (Figs. 
16, 17), the parallelized hair, the heavily underlined long eye with the 
large swimming iris, the horizontal upper lid, the loose ear, the nose 
with the cloven light and the sharp alinasal angle; and in the heavy 
contours. 

But if their origins are the same, their individual styles are irrecon- 
cilable. Their outward resemblances confine them within the Nar- 
desque group, but the divergencies of their fresco technique, of their 
drawing (of hands especially), of their modelling, of the scale, and the 
deeper discrepancy of feeling, and of taste, divide them within that 


I2I 


group. The dryness, the heroic detachment, the realistic action, the 
mass distribution, in the lowest tier, ought to set its painter apart from 
Niccolo conclusively. 

This differentiation might be finally confirmed by the discovery of 
other works by the master of the lowest tier. It happens that one such 
work comes to hand, and that it substantiates the above argument and 
the artistic independence of his personality. 

First, however, it will be necessary to demonstrate that it was ac- 
tually painted by him. A five-leaved altarpiece (Fig. 17), it hangs in 
the Florentine Academy, in all the glory of its original tempera, un- 
marred alike by restorer and the abomination of modern varnish. It 
represents the Vision of St. Bernard in the central compartment, with 
saints in the wings, and is well known in critical literature as an 
“Orcagna.” 

Its attribution to this great master boasts a line of high sanctions. 
Suida (1905, 13) sees in it more distinctly than elsewhere “Orcagna’s 
Eigenart” (intimately personal style), and Venturi (1906, V, 772), 
all the “nobilta dell’ artista.” More recently Sirén (1917, I, 230) in- 
clines to assign it to a “rather advanced stage of Orcagna’s activity, 
when his younger brothers or other helpers took a considerable part 
in the execution of his paintings.” Van Marle (III, 465-6) on the 
contrary, would put it into Orcagna’s earlier period, but he cautiously 
places a question mark after Orcagna’s name under the illustration. 

Such persistence must have its grounds, especially after Mr. Beren- 
son (in his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, ed. 1912, 161) al- 
lowed only one extant painting — the Strozzi altarpiece—to Orcagna; 
and these abide largely in the immanent genius of the picture. For the 
eye there can be no two opinions: the physical, measurable factors, the 
graphology, distinguish the Academy and the Strozzi polyptychs for- 
ever. 

On the other hand it is easy, in the thick of minute evidence, to 
forget that all the glow of St. Bernard’s Vision is reflected from the 
Strozzi altarpiece. The shining grace in the attended Virgin, and the 
swelling rapture of the saint, give off a sort of intensity which bestows 
not a miraculous, but a lyrical reality upon the moment. 

Although the analogies stop here, one is tempted to continue to see 
them in certain resemblances which, purely external, are due to the 
fact that the painter was here imitating a design by Orcagna. But 
there is not a single figure in the Academy polyptych that harbors any 
of the significance of the Strozzi figures, that has any of their sweep, 


122 


their majesty, the heedless preoccupation, the detachment, fatefulness 
and finality of their action. Orcagna’s figures belong to a higher and 
more evolved race, and their position in their field, their relation to it, 
suggest a wider world and deeper universe. 

The types, again, and the individual parts, are, upon close exami- 
nation, correspondingly disparate. While Orcagna’s people move with 
a courtly decorum, while their hands are designed for divine ministra- 
tions, the figures in the polyptych are of humbler stock and their hands 
for profane tasks. The figures themselves, suggest little beyond their 
momentary employment, whereas Orcagna’s action spreads eternity 
round it, and infinity round its figures. His drawing discloses at every 
point the precise function as well as the form of the shape it encloses. 
His mass has firmer subtance beneath draperies that help to articulate 
It. 

As the qualitative superiority of the Strozzi altarpiece differentiates 
it from the Academy polyptych, so the same atmosphere in this and the 
Rinuccini frescoes ought, at first blush, assimilate them to each other. 
But if this analogy is present and manifest throughout these two works, 
the stylistic identity of our master is more readily demonstrable and 
appears more sharply and clearly in the following features of the altar- 
piece and frescoes (see Figs. 15, 16); in the heavy contours; in the 
figure the wrinkles have worn in the forehead; in the crow’s-feet and 
the folds at the root of the nose; in the continuous diagonal of the pro- 
file (S. P. 3, 9, 13, 14); in the loosely adjusted mask; in the cloven 
light often on the nose and chin; in the collapsible ears (see Figs. 15, 
Pompeo’, 4,12, 13,9, 14). 

As might have been foreseen, the predella reveals more numerous 
affinities to the lower Rinuccini frescoes than other parts of the altar- 
piece. It contains figures (Figs. 18, 19) of the same stolid dignity and 
poetry, recalling Spinello, only more restrained and inspired in their 
action. The frescoes, it is true, are more mature, freer and more varied 
in incident, completer in dramatic illusion. But these are differences 
which attend the variations of a normally evolving individual as well 
as those of scale and of procedé. 

Analogies will be found by comparing the aged priest in the Mar- 
riage of the Virgin (S. P. 7) with St. John, the Evangelist, in the altar- 
piece (S. P. 4), the profiles in the Marriage of the Virgin in the Rinuc- 
cini Chapel (see Fig. 14) with that of St. Bernard (S. P. 14) in the 
central compartment of the polyptych, and also with those in the two 
scenes from his life in the predella below (see Fig. 18). The type of 


128 


the very characteristic head of the greybeard at the right (S. P. 12) in 
the fresco of the Miracle of the Magdalen reappears in the second 
head from the left in the predella representing the Decapitation of St. 
Quentin (S. P. 8); and in the head at the extreme left in the Ordeal 
of St. John, the Evangelist (S. P. 6). Finally the types, profiles, hair, 
ears and hands, the chiaroscuro of the Maries at the Tomb (S. P. 1) 
in the Rinuccini Chapel undergo only the slightest variation in the 
central compartment of the polyptych (S. P. 2) ; and the angel (S. P. 
3) at the right of the former composition is in almost exact correspond- 
ence with the seated figure of St. Bernard in the predella (S. P. 9). 
Particularly characteristic of his profiles is the way the modelling 
shadow inside the eye runs clear down to the volute of the nose, 
abutting sharply on the light along its edge. 

These two works then, the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel and 
the Academy altarpiece, should form the nucleus of an ideal personal- 
ity, to which, for the present, nothing else can be plausibly attributed. 
Nevertheless, linked together, one serves to extend the revelations of 
the other with regard to their author, whose variability besides, they in 
a measure adumbrate. 

Alike fundamentally, they both betray in different ways, the teach- 
ing of the Cioni. The Academy polyptych, however, shows a pre- 
ponderance of Orcagna’s influence, and if we judge by its tightness and 
its lyricism, it would seem earlier in its painter’s activity than the 
frescoes which are larger and looser in treatment; and which thus bear 
witness to a change of heart and a very nearly complete submission in 
his later stages to Nardo’s enchantments. 

The period of the Rinuccini Master may only be surmised on the 
specious, though inconclusive, basis that his painting in the Rinuccini 
Chapel cannot have taken place much after Giovanni left off, some 
time, therefore, between 1366 and 1369. Their style, moreover, com- 
mits them a priori to this period, which probably saw the full maturity 
of the master. If so, then the painting in the Academy panel would 
have to be earlier by some ten years, and of the epoch of Orcagna’s 
Strozzi altarpiece. 


124 


10. 


Il. 
iz, 
13. 
14. 
Ae 
16. 


17. 


NOLES 


. A briefer version of the study on Niccold di Tommaso first appeared in Arr in America, 
December, 1924, 19-35, giving rise to a brief comment in Van Marle, V, 478, where he denies the 
frescoes in the Convento del T to this master. 


. I am assuming that this designation will furnish no ground for confusion with Suida’s “Meister 


des Rinuccini Altars” (45-48, 50). 


. This edifice, now called Casa Tonini, No. 355 Piazza S. Domenico, Pistoia, was originally a church 


and monastery dedicated to St. Anthony of Vienna in 1340, and popularly called Convento del T, 
because of the Greek tau worn by the monks on their frocks. (See Giglioli, Pistoia, 134). 


. The fresco representing the Savior in Paradise with the signs of the Zodiac above Him, described 


by Cavalcaselle (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, ed. Hutton, I, 414) is no longer distinguishable. 


. Ciampi (in his Notizie inedite della Sagrestia Pistoiese de’ Belli Arredi, Firenze, 1810) attributes 


some of the frescoes in the chapter-house of S. Francesco, Pistoia, without any basis, to one 
Antonio Vite, who to this day remains, in spite of desperate efforts, nothing but a name. This 
author sees enough similarity in the paintings at the Convento del T to those of S. Francesco, to 
assume they are by the same master. In this Tolomei (Guida di Pistoia, Pistoia, 1821) follows 
Ciampi. Cavalcaselle identifies the painter of the Convento del T with the one who decorated 
the ceiling of the said chapter-house, and with the one who painted The Marriage of the Virgin, 
The Stoning of St. Stephen, The Mourning over Stephen’s Body, in a chapel in the right transept 
in the Prato Cathedral — these three being, incidentally, by two independent fifteenth century 
hands. 


. Reproduced in the Catalogue of an Exhibition of Florentine Painting before 1500 (The Burlington 


Fine Arts Club, 1920), plate I, under the name of Giovanni da Milano. 


. This panel has been fully described in the Guide to the Vatican Picture Gallery (Rome, 1914), 


No. 183, where it is ascribed to Sano di Pietro. 


. The Agnolesque fresco on the entrance wall of S. Maria Novella, is the only painting similarly 


composed, that occurs to me. 


. Attributed in the Catalogue of the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, 1912, I, 69, to the 


Following of Allegretto Nuzi. 


See L. Salazar, La Chiesa di Sant’ Antonio Abate (in Napoli Nobilissima, anno XIV, 1905, 53-54); 
also Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton), I, 281; Khvoshinsky e Salmi, I Pittori Toscani, 
Il Trecento, Roma, 1914, II, figs. 34-36. 


Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton), I, 281. 
Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton), I, 281. 
Vasari, L 694, 0, 2: 
Vasari, I, 583, n. 2. 


Compare Niccoldé di Tommaso and the Rinuccini Master with respect to the mood, the mask, the 
narrowly open eye, the furrows around it, and the hair. 


See Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton, I, 339) where the authors attribute the entire Rinuccini 
Chapel to the hand of Giovanni da Milano. 


Far from giving him a name, Suida (32 et seq.) does not even attempt a characterization of this 
master. Toesca (in his Pittura e Miniatura nella Lombardia, 226, n. 5) attributes the lowest tier 
to Giov. del Biondo, followed in this view by Sirén, Catalogue of Jarves Coll., Yale University, 
1916, 47. Venturi, V, 913, sees the distinction vaguely and incompletely; Van Marle (III, 528, 
n, 1) thinks them by a pupil of Giov. da Milano. 


125 


~ “we 


e 


18, See note 16. 

ro8 Vocarh T5723 n, 2. 
20. Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani, II, 1858, 65. 
21. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 187 et seq.; Suida, 29. 
22. See reproductions Venturi, V, 913, 914. . 


126, 


Mmrwnd = 


DeErTAILs FROM THE Paintincs oF NiccoLo pi Tommaso 


Pistoia, Convento del T., The Temptation. 
New York, Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, St. James. 
Pistoia, Convento del T., Adam and Eve. 
Florence, Fondazione Horne, St. Paul. 

Pistoia, Convento del T., Paradise. 


(3), 
&. 


9. 
10. 


Florence, Academy, Coronation. 

Pistoia, Convento del T., Paradise. 

Pistoia, Convento del T., The Temptation. 
New York, Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, St. James. 
Pistoia, Convento del T., The Temptation. 


Ankwne 


i | 


DETAILS FROM THE PAINTINGS OF THE Rinuccin1 MAsTER 


Florence, S. Croce, Maries at the Tomb. 
Florence, Academy, Polyptych. 

Florence, S. Croce, Maries at the Tomb. 
Florence, Academy, Polyptych. 

Florence, Academy, Polyptych. 

Florence, Academy, Polyptych. 

Florence, S. Croce, Marriage of the Virgin. 


SHNv=- OO DM 


Florence, Acadeniy, Polyptych. 

Florence, Academy, Polyptych. 

Florence, S. Croce, Marriage of the Virgin. 

Florence, S. Croce, Miracle of the Magdalen. 
Florence, S. Croce, Miracle of the Magdalen. 
Florence S. Croce, Miracle of the Magdalen. 
Florence, Academy, Polyptych. 


DOI “f Jap OywseUoy 


“I “SI 


L aNvV NOILVLINA], 3H, /OSVNWOT Id OTODDIN 


ra 


NOISTNdX) FH 


ee 


‘ > 4 
oe 
Hv 7 
oa a 
‘ a7 6 oP 
3 * 
L By 45" 
Rad 
gee 
¥ es i 
a , 
‘ LF 
aw fhe ee 
Bs : hat be 
: ras 
re 2 
wake 
é Lis 
a “ 
“ ™ Od 
. * ies 
ac ae 
a N 
Bs r 
ms 
ai # 
« bf 
“? 
. 
. 
j s 
. e 
< 
A 
iu 
i 
> 


zl > 
Cle iliac bel 
‘ 


Fic. 4. Niccoto pt Tommaso: St. JAMEs 
Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, New York 


—— 
* 


4 
AS 
I % 
Ay 
1 
4 
At 
fP 
, 
5 
f 


! 


FiG.33; 


et et Ae eee ee Mee i i es Ee ee Bt 


—~ r+ 


NiccoLto pt Tommaso: THE CoronaTIon 
Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence 


Fic. 7. Niccoto pt Tommaso: DetaiL oF Fic. 5. Niccoto pt Tommaso: Fic. 6. Niccoto pt Tommaso: Fic. 11. Niccoio pr Tommaso: 
St. Joun, THE EVANGELIST St. Joun, THE EVANGELIST St. Paut Derait or St. ANTHONY 


Fondazione Horne, Florence Fondazione Horne, Florence Fondazione Horne, Florence S. Antonio Abate, Naples 


Fic. 8. Nuiccoto pt Tommaso: Tue Nativity 


Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome 


“”~ 


Al 


| 


MASO: TABERNACLE 


Tom 


he Johnson Collection, Philadelphia 


a 
° 
o 
ic) 
oO 
4 


Al 


5) 


Sado ‘21VqQP Oww0jwP *g fo yruny 


‘Ol ‘OI 


OSVIWWO T Id OTOODOINS 


HOALdIY [, 


ASAOTNOT, AO SINO'T “LS 
aNV ‘LSITZDNVAQ, FHL ‘NHOfL “1 


YwaALad “LO GNV SIONVUY LS 


STAINY HALIM “Loqy FHL ‘ANOHINY “LS 


APN SG tl 


SNe MMMM AS fm 


Fic. 12. Grovanni pa Mitano: Fic. 13. Giovanni pA Mrtano: Birra oF THE VIRGIN 
Derait or SAINTS IN ALTARPIECE Rinuccini Chapel, S. Croce, Florence 


Uffizi Gallery, Florence 


& 


Fic. 14. THe Rrnuccint Master: MarriacE OF THE VIRGIN 
Rinuccini Chapel, Church of S. Croce, Florence 


Fic. 15. THe Rinuccini Master: Detam or THE PRESENTATION 
OF THE VIRGIN 
Church of S. Croce, Florence 


Fic. 16. THe Rinuccini Master: Derait or THe MARRIAGE 


OF THE VIRGIN 
Church of S. Croce, Florence 


Fic. 17. THe Rinuccrni Master: Potyprycu 


Academy, Florence 


a 


Wat sarin 


Fic. 18. Tue Rinuccini Master: St. Bernarp ANp DiscipPLes 
(Derait or PrEDELLA To PoLyrprycH) 


Academy of Fine Arts, Florence 


Fic. 19. Tue Rinuccint MAster: ScENE FROM THE Lire-or Sr. Joun, THE EVANGELIST 
(Detar. or PrepeLLta To PoLyprycH) 


Academy of Fine Arts, Florence 


oa 


AN OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF METHOD 


‘ORe may safely say that the criticism of art is not only in a stage, 
but in a situation. It is enjoying a peculiar ascendency with an 
eager public, which, in the more intellectually awake Europe, has for 
several decades past, been aware of its existence. But now at last, and 
in America especially, it has come out of its proper ambient of museum 
and library, is being taught in colleges, juggled in conversation, and 
applied with daring enterprise, by professional and novice alike, in the 
traffic of pictures. 

Of course, from the point of view of Knowledge — or at least an 
honest pursuit of it — these progressive changes become grotesquely 
humorous, but perhaps also somewhat alarming, by providing a new 
scene, after all, not natural to it, and by extending its normal uses. 
It is this that, in spite of the exalted claims of its practitioners, tends to 
divert a discreet study from its true course by setting up two kinds of 
truth: the truth which represents a conformity to fact, and the truth 
inspired by practical convenience, which, in so tight an economic or- 
ganization as the present, is more cogent because concrete, and more 
intelligible because automatically operative. The crowning fact in the 
inherent comedy is that sanctioned authorities have, in some instances, 
been dividing their allegiance between the two kinds of truth, without 
differentiating in every case as to its kind or object. 

With this situation prevailing, general ignorance and a defective 
sense of scholarship, have been complicating matters even farther. 
This is perhaps the best that can be expected — certainly I should not 
set myself up as a judge of that — it, nevertheless, renders the practice 
of scholarship, and its diffusion a problem. The more friendly and 
thoughtful public that skirts the subject has, generally speaking, nar- 
row experience, small reading, smaller culture, and no tried technique 
for appropriating it independently. It has consequently no secure 
standards for appraising the pronouncements of learning; and so in- 
fluences its output retroactively. 

Meanwhile criticism itself has in the course of the last two decades 
taken a turn, which is hardly being adequately realized. Following a 
period of pioneering, in which the student extended himself over the 
various schools in all the length of their evolution, comes the present, 


127 


wherein the field is beginning to contract both chronologically and ter- 
ritorially. Whereas the outgrown past fixed its centre of research in the 
isolated head of a school, admitting a certain shading-off in quality to 
his artistic dependents, the historical area today is being cut up into 
smaller units, and seen with a shifting focus. The older generation of 
critics — incidentally one may say, more richly endowed and inspired 
than the present — working with a large field before them, singled out 
the great figures of known name. 

And the result was a historic panorama with only the peaks visible 
above the nebula that covered the lesser heights and foothills. Such 
limitation of prospect was imposed upon criticism by a fashionable 
snobbery ; but also by an exquisite sense of value, and a consciously 
exalted taste in the critic, who held to his preferences the more stub- 
bornly, the deeper their subjectivity. Fashion and ignorance can still 
afford to condescend to none but the consecrated names. Besides, 
simple self-endearing human indolence threw its weighty sanctions on 
the side of this attitude. It will always be more winsomely natural to 
ignore all that is not conventionally great, and to mind only what is 
easy to remember. The most important issues in the universe rely for 
their very existence on the human mind’s limited capacity for seeing 
and retaining. 

Wherefore, the pictures bearing the stamp of a known style were, 
by common habit, and in the practice of criticism, labelled with a name 
best known of those who painted in it. 

It is to all these circumstances, mingled with hero-worshipping 
sentimentalism, that a generous tolerance of this baptismal habit is to 
be laid. But the error involved in its indulgence proceeded from a 
tendency at once more radical and more dangerous, and that is the 
reading of ancient artistic motives by modern notions of individualism 
in artistic creation. Of course, theoretically the critic is too knowing 
to slip into so elementary an error; but in the heat of performance his 
egoism plunges him into the most childlike variety of muddled inno- 
cence: 

He will admit as an intolerable commonplace that there are scores 
of names in the archives and in early literature, with which no existing 
works may be identified; that the dim aura of satellites surrounding 
the great masters must have kept up a steady production — but a 
reputable name emits a human warmth and personal suggestions that 
appeal overwhelmingly to his heart, and its explicitness, irresistibly to 
his understanding, against the welter of shadowy anonymity. A name 


128 


is after all a name, and I have heard him exclaim in a sublime despair, 
that where there is no sure way to the truth, blind inspiration may hit 
onit. What a comfort must it be to him that his subject lacks the rigid 
exactions of a science — although it has been so designated (“Wissen- 
schaft”) in countries where accuracy is forever overreaching itself! 

And yet science or no science, I seriously believe that the art-histori- 
an has this in common with the better part of thinking humanity, that 
he knows by a sort of Kantian intuition when he is right, or at least 
when the tendency of his conclusion is. For if scientific truth will 
never be arrived at, in a subject that draws its material from a func- 
tional reaction, our conclusions, as will be seen, are capable of reaching 
objective validity. Unhappily, such is the genial perversity of our kind, 
this intuition is unavailing against the vicious determination to stamp 
fact with the mind’s own idiosyncracies, on top of the willing admission 
that fact has its own nature, its own laws, its own logic and its own 
whims. 

The critic, being tenderly human, constitutionally perhaps rather 
than mentally, fails to realize the disparity between modern and an- 
cient conditions of artistic activity ; and upon this error rests the bet- 
ter part of modern critical practice. 

To-day, art is first of all a privileged calling, tolerated but seldom 
collectively encouraged, because it has no economic justification. In 
order to exercise his vocation, the artist must first win his freedom of 
the worldly exigencies by some form of ransom or by rebellion. As his 
activity is in its nature ideal rather than practical, he cuts himself off 
from the world; as it touches the spirit, as it is expansive rather than 
strenuous, it raises him above the grouillement of common life, and the 
neutralizing effect of its shared interests. In his isolation he evolves 
a personal language and addresses himself to a specialized audience. 
All this makes him look upon his expression as an attribute of the ego, 
a badge of distinction, a concession of something greater and more pre- 
cious. His self-sufficiency reinforces his fancied superiority ; his aloof- 
ness endows him with mystery; his privileged activity, with glamour, 
and his reputation, with a prestige-value; until, as in notorious in- 
stances, he comes to regard himself, and to be regarded, as something 
almost holy. Hence the modern romantic attitude, of art as self- 
expression, and its modern debasement to self-exhibition. 

In the tightly organized community of the early Renaissance, on the 
contrary, the artist was a product and an incident of its life, a creature 
of its need, part of the solid body social and economic. Life having 


129 


been lived in normal function, people had their being on earth and 
above it in vital alternation. They had dreams and longings which, 
because founded in function, had a spiritual validity untainted by de- 
spair or distrust. They arrived the more directly at a personal organ- 
ization, and a vision of life at once simple, vivid and clear. 

On a scale which was consistent with perfect social and economic 
coordination, the community, often divided by party strifes, unsettled 
by wars, nevertheless had the same religion, and within the same walls, 
the same local tradition touching all things. This was continuous and 
pervasive. Serving a smaller group of needs, and needs more harmon- 
ized, such a tradition changed slowly. And opportunity being narrow- 
ly limited, vocation had to be subsumed under a limited variety of 
conventional occupations, in which by general rule, the apprentice, in 
painting as in other crafts, from early boyhood worked in accordance 
with a small number of settled formulas. He repeated the drawings 
of his master, learned to paint like him, and adopted the subjects, 
shapes, motifs, used before him. Properly speaking he never imitated 
nature. The artist’s creative effort, like his personality, was merged in 
a common consciousness, and a common past; and in his practice, ac- 
cordingly, he drew upon images that were remembered collectively as 
well as individually. 

All earthly vexation, disabuse and despair were rendered tolerable 
by the comfortings and guaranties of an indestructible Church. The 
promises of this Church filled the ultimate void; as the whole system 
of human life, a life without radical changes, provided ultimate con- 
victions. The creative energy did not waste itself, as it does to-day, in 
having to combat the modern malady, the futility of effort. 

It was this very Church that furnished the explicit occasions for 
creative expression. T'o render herself sensible, this Invisible Church 
must needs build churches, and to interpret herself to her worshippers, 
she had to cover their walls with her teachings. And the artist painted 
because his services were direly required for this supremely important 
end. The practical necessity on the one hand, and the impressive signs 
of her consequence, on the other, lent a solid basis to his activity. His 
work might be bad, it could never be useless, fatuous or questionable. 

Born into such a world, the painter was bound to regard his calling 
humbly as a means of mere livelihood. He had come by the mastery 
of his art in the harmless animal process of growing up, in an environ- 
ment wherein its value rested in its practical suitability, rather than in 
arbitrary superiorities. 


130 


Art, accordingly, was not looked upon as a personal expression. It 
was a racial expression. Nevertheless, by availing itself of artistic 
media tried in a long tradition, individual achievement presented an 
individual character reinforced by real power, more naturally than in 
the isolated painter of to-day; because, with small exception, all the 
artistic output had behind it besides, the energy, experience, maturity, 
conviction, of a great race and a fortunate age. 

Under such conditions the artist had no romantic illusions regard- 
ing the sacredness of his art, still less of his person, and because of it, 
thought nothing of allowing assistants to help him in the execution of 
his works, and even to paint independently under his name (as notably 
in the case of Giotto or Giambellini). 

Now, whereas the older criticism, as we have seen, by a sort of 
genteel transcendentalism, confined itself to known figures, and sur- 
rounded them with a void; the ideal, more detached, specialized mod- 
ern historian of art is scrupulously bent on according every painter his 
proper character, and proper place, as he would the objects of a land- 
scape — leaving appraisal to another critical occasion. 

Although it must be conceded to the champions of quality in art, 
that some of these painters are of slight intrinsic importance, the 
knowledge of them, at the very worst, furnishes a more enlightened 
view of the area, helps the critic besides to gauge the peculiar genius 
of the determining historical figures, to sharpen their features, to draw 
their outlines more tightly around them, and to measure the extent of 
their influence. | 

As the painter did not approach art as self-expression, he fell in 
with traditional modes, and contented himself with painting like his 
forerunners or confréres, by analogies that were common within a 
school. In the search for the identity of the master of a single work 
or of a group, accordingly, it would be necessary to remember how 
intricately involved a hypothetical personality was with others, how 
much more objective the methods of discovery have consequently to 
be from those of preceding generations. 

But the difference between modern and older methods is one of 
degree rather than of kind, and the methods of the present follow from 
the stage just before it in the normal course of evolution. They involve 
refinements — let us say refinements of technique rather than of 
sensibility — which the older pioneering generation formulated, but 
with notorious exceptions, was not in so good a position to apply as 


131 


the present, on account of the general preparation of the field it was 
called upon to make. 


To find a personality one must discover the term common to a 
given series of works. The technique of approach from authenticated 
works is prejudicial to an objective conclusion. A personality dis- 
closes itself in certain terms common to a group of works, which the 
limited number of authenticated ones may contain in a misleading 
measure or combination. Moreover it is not the social and human 
identity, not the name of a master that we are seeking, but the in- 
trinsic artistic personality. Finally, the method of the common term 
leaves us free to work from the heart of the problem, regardless of all 
external or fortuitous incident. 

But to evolve a conception of an artistic personality one must have 
found its style in the individual work. Style cannot be known save 
through its direct experience. If such an experience be positive — and 
none other concerns us — it is exclusive and unique. By the last at- 
tribute it is also differentiable, furnishing the first condition of con- 
noisseurship. 

In normal susceptibilities it produces a kind of ecstasy, the ecstasy 
of perfect adjustment, distinguished from mystic and sensual rapture 
of love or prayer, by its instant resolution into its constructive factors, 
that may be called shapes. Shape is the ultimate unit of style — as the 
condition of style is an ecstatic experience. This has its systole and 
diastole: it contracts with the binding synthesis; and expands again in 
flyingly noting the relation of individual shapes to the total shape, 
wherein they stand in sharply and swiftly perceived relation to each 
other. 

It is thus in terms of shape that we divine style; it is in shape that 
we arrive at it. But so long as our total consciousness is suffused, so 
long as its content is single and synthetic, we assimilate shape in de- 
nominations of visual measure too fine and elusive for the mind to 
hold. 

We know it neither through the mind nor primarily through vision, 
but directly by its correspondence in function. At that instant we are 
organized by the aesthetic impact. A new lucidity is struck out of our 
chaos. Our life-cells are reassembled in accordance with the pattern 
of the object, our organic rhythms timed by it, and our structure caught 
in a new tension. But that instant once passed, shape becomes material 
for the cognitive faculty — at the point at which chemistry becomes 


132 


physics. ‘There precisely actual shape forfeits its ultimate but fugitive 
reality, and becomes generic, typical shape or represented shape. It 
ceases to exist as a work of art: it describes something else to which it 
directs the attention. As long, however, as it remains an experience, 
the actual shape carries the radical rhythm, that pervades the whole 
work of art. This rhythm sustained at its own pitch, holds the con- 
structive vitality of a work of art. By it every part is absorbed in the 
whole in a synthetic tension, as every sense is absorbed in its experi- 
ence; and by it all the associated aspects of the shape are drawn into 
the aesthetic vortex. ‘The greater the work of art, the more swiftly will 
this happen, the more surely will the binding radical rhythm lead us to 
the whole from any of its parts. 

It would be falsifying the psychology of aesthetic experience to 
suppose that it contains nothing besides these abstract values. It is 
true it reveals itself primarily as shape, but as such it is only a mani- 
festation—its immediate manifestation. In so far as the artistic object 
is representative—and it is representative art that concerns us here— 
so long as it contains animate figures related in action, it is charged 
with the atmosphere and the ethical implications of the action, so that 
the object has at one moment direct vibrations as shape, at the next, 
suggestions of its action, and its identity in nature; the intrinsic ma- 
terial denotations of shape, that is, alternate with the connoted meaning 
of its action, and of its identity; but none of these is capable of sepa- 
rate existence, cach being a manifestation of all the others in an 1n- 
extricable oneness. ‘Thus a certain length, bend and position of a line 
describe a figure and its gesture, even as that line releases its own force 
and quality. 

It is the critical fact about art as distinguished from practical life, 
that the effect it produces in a normal consciousness is felt in the terms 
of the object; the more explicitly in a visual art like painting, as it 
works with definite and concrete images. It is accordingly in the in- 
stantaneous evolution of the aesthetic series that the suffused con- 
sciousness of the aesthetic crisis steadies itself in the shapes that 
first produced it; and only the voluptuary or hysteric would content 
himself with the ecstasy without returning to its dasis. It is in this re- 
turn from the ecstasy to the objective source, from a suffused to a see- 
ing consciousness, from rapture to vision, that the critical moment con- 
sists ; whereas on the contrary, the “aesthete” would avail himself of art _ 
as he might of a scent, to set him drifting through a state of the con- 
sciousness, rendered delicious by its sensual analogies of effortless and 


133 


uninhibited, lulling or gliding, movement through space. The imagery 
of such a consciousness is uncontrolled. It has neither pattern nor or- 
ganization. In fact it is by its independence of any controlling prin- 
ciple, that the sensation is capable of sustaining and reproducing itself. 
And every instant bears it farther away from the premises of the object. 
The content of the sensation will consequently tend to become arbi- 
trary, and its end will be the unfolding of a series of sensations and 
images drawn from the stock of an intimate and eccentric dream-world, 
varying with each individual. 

But the normal person, who has experienced the object, who has 
consequently appropriated it, grants it its artistic prerogative, by for- 
ever correcting the sum of his reactions with it, carrying them back to 
their visible terms, checking them up with the shapes in which they 
arose. By this process criticism accomplishes an objective, if it fails — 
as it must do to the end of time — in reaching a scientific validity. 

Scarcely then, have we become aware of the principle of unity (of 
the actual shape), than it resolves itself into its conventional substi- 
tutes, generic or geometric shapes. ‘The memory, at one remove from 
authenticity, being a sort of blind vessel, in order to retain what is sub- 
mitted to it and stored in it, by first-hand experience, is reduced to 
simplifying its material by generalizing it, by grouping it according to 
kind. That is how —as the incessant chemistry of mind and body 
bears us from state to state, from mood to mood, varying our imagery 
in atomic units of change, in focus and in sharpness — the aesthetic 
crisis (actual shape) tends to forfeit its peculiar conformation and its 
explicit character. So that by the rule, that no tension can sustain it- 
self beyond its moment within the human organism, the aesthetic ex- 
perience perpetually drifts towards a fading memory of function and a 
simplifying memory of vision. On the other hand, the object’s intimate 
correspondence in function tends to hold it for us. One might put it 
differently by saying that the experience wavers between actual shape 
and generic shape. Just how far actual shape will tend to become 
generic shape will depend on the practical question of purpose. When 
that is — as it is here — to find the personality, then actual shape will 
seek its type— typical shape, before, that is, it has lost those vital 
terms, which, corresponding in function, hold it together; while it iso- 
lates those fortuitous terms, that are primarily visual, and that vary 
from work to work. 

The vitality, being constant, belongs to the creative individual, the 
fortuity to the work — just as, letting the fortuitous terms drop away 


134 


from the actual shape, we have left the typical shape: the shape that 
typifies him. 

Thus by moving from the actual shape to the typical shape, we are 
relating one work to others by the same creative identity. Such group- 
ing of one work with others of its kind, however, is an inner gesture, 
enacted spontaneously in the function itself, before the extinction of 
the aesthetic moment, when the faculties are still vibrant with it, and 
before experience becomes the object of memory. 

This is the act of attribution — attribution, in reality, being no 
more than the recognition of a recurring experience, with free varia- 
tions. 

The confusion, to say nothing of wilful distortion, of two or more 
masters is, therefore, at its best, a failure of function; and frequently 
simply recklessness, incompetence or insensibility. 

Now, as the aesthetic moment gives us the actual shape, the object 
is classified by its generic shape. In language the generic shape would 
be described by a conceptual word (a noun), the actual shape by a 
combination of them or by qualifying ones (adjectives). But even then 
language would have described the actual shape partially, for language 
cannot really reach beyond generic suggestions, beyond the generic 
shape or the geometric shape. 

Language is conceptual; it consists of classified terms, capable of 
describing only the ideated experience of sense; it begins to capture 
that experience at the point at which it becomes the object of memory 
— at which it becomes memory. And as memory generalizes all such 
experience by classification, all adventures of the eye like those of 
touch, of taste, of smell, of hearing, elude language. Language can 
barely approximate them, and then only by analogy or example. The 
farther a shape is removed from the geometric, the less capable will 
language be of rendering it. 

Language has only one conceivable means of reproducing the ac- 
tual shape, and that is by indicating the exact position of every one of 
its points. But even then, a point being a theoretical concept, those 
concrete agents of texture and color under which it manifests itself to 
sense would still be inaccessible to literary statement. It is for such 
reasons that literary and pictorial modes are eternally irreconcilable; 
and it is a fair presumption that if shape could be presented in words, 
it would never have been painted. 

For it is in the material elements of wood, of canvas, of gesso, of 
pigment and its color, used in a special order, that the radical differen- 


135 


tia lie of such a work distinguishing it from literature as from every 
thing else. 

Words failing, there remains one way of adumbrating pictorial 
images, and that is by black-and-white photography. This is not near- 
ly as adequate as it is plausible, but it has until now been the only 
means accessible. 

If photography were an entirely mechanical process it would ren- 
der the pictorial object with a calculable difference from it. Unhappily, 
photography is largely an interpretative affair. It has this in common 
with general artistic practice, that the result is determined by the whim 
and genius of the operator, and the camera is only one of the determi- 
nants of the result. The operator of the machine adjusts it to those 
factors in the object which the human eye, subject to individual varia- 
bility, distinguishes in it. 

We need not even speak of the absence of color. Photography has 
not yet learnt to reproduce that with any accuracy or reliability. It 
can render its values, but then only with a proper correction of the lens 
by screens, specially sensitized plates, and so on. The degree of cor- 
rection, besides, will depend on the retinal sensibility in the photo- 
grapher. But photography has further limitations. It forfeits scale, 
which is an essential aesthetic factor, in reducing the original to a 
small fraction of its size, and thereby not only contracts the shapes, 
but congests them. 

Nevertheless, photography remains the best available simulation of 
the original, and the only corrective of the verbal system. The sole 
admissible method of demonstration therefore would be by collateral 
reproductions made by the most recent mechanical contrivances, and 
representing the average photographer’s record of the original. 

And even then, even if we were conceding photography the power 
of rendering the original with calculable differences, the changes it un- 
derwent through the centuries, the violence to which it had been sub- 
jected, the wanton, innocent, or obstinately benighted restorations, 
would still have to be discounted in order to leave us anything like the 
truth. 


136 


INDEX OF ARTISTS, AUTHORS, AND PERIODICALS 


Agnolo Gaddi, 31, 94. 

Albertini, Francesco, 20. 

Allegretto Nuzi, 48, 107, 125. 

Altichiero, 81. 

Ambrogio di Baldese, 90, 91, 93. 

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 104. 

American Journal of Archaeology, 80, 107. 

Ancona, Paolo d’, 14, 21. 

Andrea da Firenze, 113. 

Andrea del Castagno, 49. 

Andrea di Cione (see Orcagna). 

Andrea Vanni, 78, 79. 

Angelico, Fra, 1, 112. 

Anonimo Gaddiano, The, 39, 42. 

Antonio Billi, 20. 

Antonio di Francesco da Venezia (see Antonio 
Veneziano). 

Antonio Veneziano, 57, 67-81. 

Antonio Vite, 125. 

Art in America, 20, 64, 74, 80, 95, 107, 125. 

Arte, L’, 41, 64. 

Arts, The, 21. 


Bacchiacca, 2. 

Bacci, Peleo, 107. 

Baldese (see Ambrogio di Baldese). 

Barnaba da Modena, 79. 

Beato Andrea Gallerani, 79. 

Belvedere, 28, 33, 42. 

Berenson, Bernard, 21, 31, 48, 64, 91, 100, 106, 
107, 108, 122. 

Bernardo Daddi, 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 20, 24, 25, 27, 
30, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 60, 61, 64, 
65, 68, 71, 77, 78, 93, 104, 108. 

Bicci di Lorenzo, 41, 90. 

Bollettino d’ arte, 31, 32, 39, 41, 42, 48, 65, 91, 
107. 

Bonaventura, S., 20. 

Borenius, Tancred, 20, 91, 94. 

Botticelli, 2, 104. 

Buffalmacco, 17, 21, 24, 107. 

Burlington Magazine, The, 21, 30, 31, 41, 64, 94. 


Cavalcaselle (see Crowe and ——). 
Cavallini, 17. 

Carocci, 64. 

Ciampi, 80, 125. 

Cimabue, 42. 

Cioni, The, 38, 83, 88, 90, 99, 103, 124. 
Cockerell, Sidney, 21. 

Coppo di Marcovaldo, 42. 


Crowe and Cavalcaselle, 23, 31, 41, 57, 64, 80, 
86, 91, 95, 107, 120, 125, 126. 
Cruttwell, Maud, 21, 57. 


Daddi (see Bernardo Daddi). 

De Marzo, Giov., 81. 

Dami, Luigi, 31, 32, 39. 

Deodato Orlandi, 26. 

Donatello, 30. 

Duccio di Buoninsegna, 2, 26, 28, 38, 39, 104. 
Dugento, The, 21, 25, 27, 42, 57. 


Farinata degli Uberti, 57. 

Fogg Pieta (see Master of the). 
Forster, 80. 

Frey, Karl, 42, 65. 


Gamba, Count Carlo, 41, 92. 

Gazette des Beaux Arts, 80. 

Gerini, The, 83, 95. 

Ghiberti, 20, 21, 107. 

Giambellini, 131. 

Giglioli, Eduardo, 125. 

Giorgione, 106. 

Giottesque, 30, 39, 52, 53, 56, 64, 67. 

Giptio. $12 2213 4.117.510 120 net he a te Oy 
40, 42, 49, 53, 56, 57, 60, 107, 131. 

Giotto, Pupil of, 31. 

Giotto, School of, 6. 

Giovanni del Biondo, 92, 125. 

Giovanni da Milano, 79, 107, 112, 113, 118, 119, 
FoO 1I2T st z4 nize, 

Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli, 80. 

Giovanni dal Ponte, 23, 41. 

Guido da Siena, 107. 


Horne, Herbert, 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 
28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 41, 42, 113, 115, 116, 
117. (Also see Flor. Coll. Horne). 


“Tl Biadaiuolo,” the Illuminator of, 17. 


Jacopo del Casentino, 10, 23-42, 94. 

Jacopo di Cione, 88, 89, 90, 91. 

Jahrbuch der Koniglichen Preussischen Kunst- 
samml. (See Prussian Jahrbuch). 


Khvoshinsky e Salmi, 29, 39, 125. 
Kunstchronik, 26. 


Lasinio, 91. 
Leonardo, 98. 
Libro dell’ Estimo, 24. 


Lorenzetti, The, 2, 39, 71, 78, 108. 
Lippo Memmi, 27, 34. 

Lorenzo d’ Alessandro, 57. 
Lorenzo Monaco, 2, 79, 80, 90. 
Lorenzo di Niccold, 30, 91, 92, 93. 
Luca di Tommé, 28. 


Maestro del Codice di S. Giorgio, 20, 

Magliabechiano, I] Codice, 42. 

Margaritone, 57. 

Mariotto di Nardo, 94. 

Maso, 17, 56, 81. 

Master of the Fogg Pieta, 49-57. 

Master, The S. Cecilia, 1, 11, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 
31, 40, 42. 

Master, The Rinuccini, 2, 109-126. 

Master of the St. Nicholas Chapel, Assisi, 56. 

Matteo di Giovanni, 78, 81. 

Meister des Rinuccini Altars, 125. 

Milanesi, Gaetano, 3, 20, 41, 57, 79, 81. 

Morey, Prof. Chas., 21. 

Monatshefte fiir Kunstwissenschaft, 20, 64. 


Nardo di Cione, 2, 56, 89, 97-108, 109, 111, 
112, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124. 

Niccolé di Tommaso, 2, 109-126. 

Niccold di Pietro Gerini, 26, 41, 83-95. 

Nicola, Giacomo De, 42. 


Offner, Richard, 80, 90, 107. 

Orcagna, 2, 17, 47, 56, 88, 89, 97, 98, 100, IOI, 
102, 103, 105, 107, 118, 122, 123, 124. 

“Orcagna, Compagno dell’,” 107. 


Pacino di Bonaguida, 3-21, 27, 30. 
“Pacino di Bonaguida, Predecessor of,” 21. 
Pietro Lorenzetti, 30, 37, 64. 

Pietro Nelli, 93. 

Prussian Jahrbuch, 20, 21. 


Quattrocento, The, 62. 


Rankin, William, 80, 107. 


Rassegna d’ arte, 41. 
Rivista d’ arte, 24, 26, 41, 42, 92, 95. 
Rossi e Lasinio, 95. 


Sacchetti, 65, 118. 


Salazar, L., 125. 
Salmi, M., 30, 33. 


Sano di Pietro, 125. 

Sassetta, 81. 

Schlosser, Julius von, 107. 

Schmarsow, August, 80. 

Schubring, Paul, 81. 

Simone Martini, 27, 37, 64, 78, 104. 

Sirén, Osvald, 21, 24, 27, 30, 41, 42, 57, 64, 65, 
80, 86, 90, 91, 97, 100, 107, 122, 125. 

Spinello Aretino, 67, 69, 71, 72, 92, 123. 

Stechow, 80. 

Suida, Wilhelm, 20, 21, 26, 31, 42, 107, 120, 
T2201 7e TG, 

Supino, B., 80, 95. 


Taddeo Gaddi, 17, 20, 25, 26, 27, 38, 39, 41, 
59-65, 68, 69, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 118. 

Taddeo di Bartolo, 57. 

Tambo di Serraglio, 20. 

Térey, Gabriel de, 41. 

Testi, Laudedeo, 80, 81. 

Thieme-Becker, 64, 65, 91. 

Thode, Henry, 20, 21. 

Toesca, Pietro, 41, 125. 

Tolomei, 125. 

Tommaso del Mazza, 93. 

Traini, 80. 

Trecento, The, 5, 7, 42, 85. 

Turino Vanni, the Second, 80. 


Van Marle, Raymond, 20, 21, 31, 42, 64, 80, 81, 
90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 107, 108, 122, 125. 

Vasari, Giorgio, 20, 23, 24, 26, 38, 39, 41, 42, 
57, 64, 65, 80, 92, 93, 107, 125, 126. 

Venturi, Adolfo, 20, 21, 41, 49, 64, 81, 107, 122, 
125, 126. 


Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst, 81. 


UN DE XSORPURISACES 


ALTENBURG 
Gallery, 80. 


AREZZO 
Cathedral, 41. 
Compagnia Vecchia di S. Giovanni, 41. 
Duomo Vecchio, 41. 
Episcopal Palace, 41. 
Gallery, 41 (see Pinacoteca). 
L’Ospedale, Sala dell’Amministrazione, 28. 
Pieve, The, 39, 41. 
Pinacoteca, 41. 
S. Agostino, 41. 
S. Domenico, 41. 
S. Francesco, 94. 
ASSISI 
S. Chiara, 20. 
S. Francesco (Lower Church), 56. 
S. Francesco (Upper Church), 21, 41, 57. 
AVIGNON 
Musée Calvet, 84, 86, 91. 
BALTIMORE 
Walters Gallery, 113, 117. 
BERLIN 
Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, 25, 26, 27, 39, 45, 
46, 60, 64. 
Fig. 2, A Daddesque Predella. 
BOLOGNA 
Pinacoteca, 20. 
Servi, Church of S. Maria de’, 42. 
BOSTON 
Museum of Fine Arts, 13, 67, 70, 73, 74, 77; 
78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 89, 91. 
Fig. 7, S. P. 2, 13, Antonio Veneziano. 
Fig. 1, S. P. 2, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 
Coomaraswamy, Dr. Ananda, 94. 
Gardner Museum, Fenway Court, 89, 91. 
Fig. 7, S. P. 7, Niccolé di Pietro Gerini. 


BRAUNSCHWEIG 
Gemildegalerie, 94. 


BROOKLYN, N. Y. 
Babbott, Frank L., Coll., 64. 


BRUSSELS 
Museum, 33. 


BUDAPEST 
Museum of Fine Arts, 21, 41. 


CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND 
Fitzwilliam Museum, 15, 94. 


CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 
Fogg Art Museum, 49, 52, 54, 55, 80. 
Fig. 7, S. P. 1, 8, 10, Master of the Fogg 
Pieta. 
Porter, A. Kingsley, Coll., 86, 91. 
CASTELFIORENTINO 
S. Verdiana, 64. 


CHICAGO 
Ryerson Collection, 85, 86, 87, 92. 
Fig. 5, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 


CHIUSDINO 
Municipio, 81. 


COPENHAGEN 
Staten’s Museum, 45, 46. 
Fig. 1, A Daddesque Predella. 


DIJON 
Musée, 64. 


EASTNOR CASTLE, ENGLAND 
Lord Somers, Coll., 29. 


EMPOLI 
Collegiata, 92. 


ENGLEWOOD, N. J. 
Platt Collection, 78. 


FIESOLE 
Bandini, Museo, 11, 42, 64, 93, 100. 
Fig. 14, Pacino di Bonaguida. 
S. P. 3, Nardo di Cione. 


S. Primerana, 91. 


FIGLINE 
Collegiata, 50, 51, 56. 
S. P. 4, 6, Master of the Fogg Pieta. 
Duomo (see Collegiata). 


FLORENCE 
Academy, 3, 9, 15, 20, 29, 37, 38, 59, 62, 84, 
86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 100, 112, 113, 117, 122, 
123, 124. 
Trg 2. -G504,05, Op 7p Oe cas 45.52.05 
7, 8, 12, 13, 14, Pacino di Bonaguida. 
Fig. 5, S. P. 6, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Fig. 2, S. P. 3, 7, Taddeo Gaddi. 
Fig. 3, S. P. 1, 6, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 
Fig. 3, S. P. 6, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. 


Fig. 17, 19. 8S. P. 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, Rmuc- 
cini Master. 

Accademia delle Belle Arti (see Academy, 
Florence). 

Acton, Arthur, Coll., 92, 94. 

S. P. 10, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini. 

Aretina, Via, Tabernacle, 93. 

Badia, Cappella Giochi e Bastari, 99, 101. 

Bargello, 93, 94. 

Berenson, Bernard, Coll., 100, 106. 

Bigallo, Sala del Consiglio, 90, 91, 93. 

Cocomero, Via di, 41. 

Horne, Fondazione, 11, 18, 20, 28, 29, 30, 32, 
RONTI3, TIS 11O. ir 
Fig. 12, Pacino di Bonaguida. 

Fig. 4, S. P. 9, 11, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Fig. 5, 6, 7, S. P. 4, Niccold di Tommaso, 
etc. 

Laurentian Library, 11. 

Loeser, Charles, Coll., 7, 24, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 
34, 37; 73, 75, 78, 79, 91. 

Fig. 10, Pacino di Bonaguida. 
Fig. 3, S. P. 1, 2, 13, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Fig. 8, 9, S. P. 9, Antonio Veneziano. 

Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 
33, 65, 94. 

Fig. 2, S. P. 5, 7, 12, Jacopo del Casentino. 

Perkins, F. Mason, Coll., 20, 51, 55. 

Fig. 5, Master of the Fogg Pieta. 

S. Ambrogio, 93. 

S. Croce, 7, 20, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 
64, 67, 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 100. 
Fig. 1, 2, 8, 9, S. P. 2, 5, 7, 9, Master of the 

Fogg Pieta. 
S. P. 8, 9, Taddeo Gaddi. 
Fig. 2, S. P. 9, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 
Fig 15, S2-Piit,03, 11; 12,137 Niceald ‘di 
Tommaso, etc. 

Baroncelli Chapel, 60, 62, 63. 

Castellani Chapel, go. 

Giugni Chapel, 57. 

Medici Chapel, 57, 64, 67. 

Peruzzi Chapel, 57. 

E:x-Refectory, 20. 

Rinuccini Chapel, 111, 120, 121, 123, 124. 
Fig. 14, 16, S. P. 7, 10, Niccolé di Tom- 

maso, etc. 
Fig. 13, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. 

S. Felice, 7, 93. 

S. Felicita, 6, 9, 60, 92, 93, 94. 

Fig. 9, S. P. 10, Pacino di Bonaguida. 
S. P. 5, Taddeo Gaddi. 

S. Giorgio, 21, 42. 

S. Giuseppe, Tabernacle near, 41. 

S. Marco, 7. 

S. Maria Novella, 2, 47, 65, 89, 97, 99, 109, 
122) 


140 


S. P. 4, 5, 7, 8, Nardo di Cione. 

Rucellai Chapel, 2, 65. 

Strozzi Chapel, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 
122,123. -¢24. 
Fig. 5, 6, 7, A Daddesque Predella. 
Fig. 10, Nardo di Cione. 

S. Miniato, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 
42, 63, 65, 91, 118. 
Fig. 9, 10, 11, 12, S. P. 8, Jacopo del Casen- 

tino. 

S. P. 11, Taddeo Gaddi. 

S. Simone, 21, 93. 

Ognissanti (Church of the), 7, 39, 56, 90, 
IOI, 106. 

Or S. Michele, 41, 60, 93, 108, 120. 
Fig. 6, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini. 

Serristori Coll., 42. 

Uffizi Gallery, 18, 21, 25, 28, 31, 32, 41, 42, 
56, 60, 61, 78, 93, 94. 
Fig. 6, S. P. 3, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Fig. 10, The Master of the Fogg Pieta. 
Fig. 4, S. P. 1, Taddeo Gaddi. 
Fig. 12, Niccolé di Tommaso, etc. 

Zecca Vecchia, 90. 

Market, The Florentine, 33, 94. 
Fig. 13, Pacino di Bonaguida. 


FRANKFORT a M. 


Rudolph Bauer Coll., 100. 
Stadel Institut, 34. 


GALUZZO 


Certosa, Chiesa Antica, 92. 


GENEVA 


Villa Ariana, 28, 31. 


GOTTINGEN 


University Museum, 27, 30, 33, 53, 74. 
S. P. 10, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Fig. 10, S. P. 8, Antonio Veneziano. 


HANNOVER 


Kestner Museum, 68, 70, 71, 78. 
Fig. 4, 8, S. P. 10, 14, Antonio Veneziano. 


IMPRUNETA 


Pieve, 93. 


LASTRA a SIGNA (See Florence). 


Coll. of F. Mason Perkins. 


LIVERPOOL 


Gallery, 78. 


LONDON 


Butler, Charles, Coll., 28. 

Crawford, Lord, Coll., 94. 

Kerr-Lawson, Coll., 91. 
S. P. 4, Taddeo Gaddi. 

National Gallery, 41, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 100, 
102, 103, 105, 107. 
Fig. 6, S. P. 2, 10, Nardo di Cione. 

Victoria and Albert Museum, 100. 


a Pe 


LUCCA 


Private Collection, 29. 


LYONS 
Musée, 94. 


MAISONS-LAFITTE 
Gould, Frank, Coll., 64. 


MAGNALE 
Church, 92. 


MENSOLA, PONTE a 
S. Martino, 60, 61, 64. 


MILAN 
Cagnola, Don Guido, Coll., 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 
30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41. 
Fig. 1, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Trivulzio, Prince, Library of, 14. 


MINNEAPOLIS 
Jones, Herschel V., Coll., 100, 102, 103, 107. 
Fig. 7, Nardo di Cione. 


MONTICI 
S. Margherita, 18, 21, 42. 


MUNICH 
Alte Pinakothek, 94, 100. 
Fig. 3, Nardo di Cione. 
Dealer, 90, 94. 
Nemes, Marczell von, Coll., 15. 


NAPLES 
Museum, 78. 
S. Antonio Abbate, 116, 117. 
Fig. 10, 11, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. 


NEW HAVEN 
Yale University, Jarves Collection, 80, 90, 92, 
93, 100, IOI, 103, 107, 125. 
Fig. 4, 5, S. P. 9, 10, Nardo di Cione. 


NEW YORK 
Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives, New 
York, 1917, 90, 91. 
Barnard Cloisters, 101. 

Fig. 8, Nardo di Cione. 

Goldman, Henry, Coll., 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 

105. 

Fig. 1, S. P. 6, Nardo di Cione. 

Griggs, Maitland F., Coll., 31, 113, 114, 115, 

117. 

Fig. 4, S. P. 2, 9, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. 
Hamilton, Carl, The Former Collection of, go. 
Historical Society, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104. 

Fig. 2, S. P. 1, Nardo di Cione. 

Hurd, Richard M., Coll., 67, 68, 69, 74, 77, 

79. 

Fig. 2, 12, Antonio Veneziano. 

Lehman Collection, 45, 46, 47, 64. 

Fig. 3, A Daddesque Predella. 
Mackay, Clarence, Coll., 81. 


Metropolitan Mus. of Art, 108. 
Morgan, J. Pierpont, Library, 12, 13, 14, 15, 
16, 27: 
Fig. 15, 16, S. P. 11, 15, Pacino di Bona- 
guida. 
Straus, Jesse I., Coll., 8, 12, 18. 
Fig. 11, S. P. 1, 2, 9, Pacino di Bonaguida. 


NUOVOLI 
Torre degli Agli, 80. 
Fig. 1, Antonio Veneziano. 
ORVIETO 
Servi (Church of the), 42. 
OXFORD 
Christ Church Library, 91, 92. 


PADUA 

Arena Chapel, 7, 53, 57. 
PALERMO 

S. Niccolé Reale, 74, 75, 76, 80. 

Fig. 13, 15, Antonio Veneziano. 

PARMA 

Gallery, 94. 
PARIS 

Louvre, 25, 93. 

Mori Collection, 21. 

Market, The, 31. 

Montor, Artaud de, Coll., 80, 107. 


PAVIA 

Galleria Malaspina, 33. 
PERUGIA 

Private Collection, 79. 
PHILADELPHIA 


Johnson Collection, 90, 114, 115, 117, 125. 
Fig. 9, Niccolé di Tommaso. 
Pennsylvania Museum, 94. 


PIAN DI MUGNONE 
S. Maria Maddalena, Convento di, 18. 


PISA 
Camposanto, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 
79, 80, 87, 90. 
Fig. 3, S. P. 6, Taddeo Gaddi. 
IDS, a, TL, TMA, We), eh, Lek ey Binder Ge Blige Hd 
Antonio Veneziano. 
Cathedral, 80. 
Museo Civico, 26, 41. 
S. Francesco, 64, 86, 91. 
S. P. 8, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 
S. Tommaso, Convento di, 69, 78. 
Fig. 6, S. P. 5, Antonio Veneziano. 
PISTOIA 
Convento del T., 113, 114, 115, 117, 125. 
Figs 1) 2, 5.. Po 1,4, Ss Woo, LO, iceo! di 
Tommaso. 


Casa Tonini (See Convento del T.). 

S. Francesco, Chapter Hall, 59, 125. 

S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas, 60, 61, 63. 
S. P. 9, Taddeo Gaddi. 


POPPI 
Castello, 64, 87. 


PRATO 
Cathedral, 125. 
Palazzo Communale. 
Fig. 4, A Daddesque Predella. 
S. Francesco, 84, 85, 91, 93. 
S. P. 3, 5, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 


PRATOVECCHIO 
Church, 24, 38, 39. 


PRINCETON, N. J. 
Marquand, Late Professor Allan, Coll., 30, 37. 
Fig. 7, Jacopo del Casentino. 


QUIETE, LA 


Conservatorio delle Montalve, 94. 


RENNES 
Musée Archeologique, 52. 


ROME 
Capitoline Museum, 93. 
Market, The, 8. 
Paolini Collection, 33, 37, 38, 40. 
S. P. 14, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Pinacoteca Vaticana, 29, 43, 93, 94, 114, 115, 
TIT 7 aabe 
Fig. 8, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. 
St. Peter’s, 30. 
Sistine Chapel, 62. 


ROVEZZANO 
S. Michele, 42. 


142 


ROSE 
San Lorenzo, 59, 60, 61. 
Fig. 1, Taddeo Gaddi. 


RUBALLA 
S. Giorgio, 90. 
S. P. 2, Taddeo Gaddi. 


SCARPERIA 
Madonna di Piazza, 31, 32, 33, 37. 


SETTIMO 
Badia, 21. 


SIENA 
Academy, 104. 
Cathedral, 79. 
S. Francesco, 78. 


SOUTHAMPTON, L. I. 
Parrish Museum, 94. 


STRASSBURG 
Museum, 64. 

S. GIMIGNANO 
Gallery, 30. 


VIENNA 
Bondy, Oscar, Coll., 30, 31, 32, 33, 34- 
Fig. 13, S. P. 4, Jacopo del Casentino. 
Tucher Collection, 107. 


VINCIGLIATA 
S. Lorenzo, 92. 
Fig. 4, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. 


WORCESTER, MASS. 
Museum of Fine Arts, 50, 52, 54, 56. 
Fig. 3, 4, S. P. 3, Master of the Fogg Pieta. 
Gentner, Philip, Coll., 61, 63. C% new, Piste 
Fig. 5, S. P. 10, Taddeo Gaddi. 
Smith, Frank, Coll., 14, 15. 
Fig. 17, Pacino di Bonaguida. 


ADDENDA 


To The Shop of Pacino di Bonaguida, to note 22: 


A discussion of the S. Giorgio Virgin appeared for the first time in 
the Burlington Magazine for 1927, L, 91-104. 


Mr. Berenson (in the Bollettino d’arte, 1926, 383, n. 8) sees an 
Umbro-Riminese hand in the Morgan [lluminations, and the Tree of 
Life; and chiefly, I venture to think, in the Cavallinesque characters in 
both, proper to a whole group of Florentine paintings of the early Tre- 
cento. Whatever Mr. Berenson may mean by such classification, there 
is nothing either in Umbria or Rimini to correspond to the above works 
in style. 


To Jacopo del Casentino: 


This master should be credited with a Virgin and Child at Pozzo- 


latico (a village south of Florence) independently identified by Mr. 
F. Mason Perkins. 


To note 17 of Jacopo del Casentino: 


I am pleased to see that Mr. Berenson in the Stadel-Jahrbuch V, 
19 (Notes on Tuscan Painters of the Trecento in the Stadel-Institut), 
agrees with my reintegration of Jacopo. 


To A Daddesque Predella: 


I have since the writing of this essay come to agree with Mr. Beren- 
son’s joining of the Lehman part of the predella to a Madonna in the 
same collection, to a triptych formerly in Mr. Carl Hamilton’s collec- 
tion, and to a St. Anthony at Fabriano (see Bolletino d’arte, Jan., 
1922). His attribution of these to Nuzi, however, I regard impossible. 


To The Master of the Fogg Pieta: 


A small (m. .26 x .235) half-length figure of the Baptist in the col- 
lection of Sig. Gnecco in Genoa, should be joined to the sum of works 
already attributed here to this painter. If its present shape may be 
trusted, it once stood in a course of pinnacles over a polyptych. 


143 


Sep eade 


+ 


TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE COPIES OF 
THIS VOLUME PRINTED FOR FREDERIC FAIR- 
CHILD SHERMAN DURING MARCH MCMXXVII 


‘ 


{ 
« 


y 


GETTY CENTEF CENTER LIB LIBRARY | 


Ce 


14 : J rr ; , us. 
: c cae Oy - 7 ar 
: Sb ee i 
wa thay a9 


a 
- 


Live 


s 7 
roe & 
ory s 

- , 7 & 


Sits cas 


inlay eA t a 
agtik, 
7 ws . Ay 

LAR” 


a} be 


4 


i 
sh 


ie hig 


aE iit aces Med 
pee ae) tas ps 


(gto 
> ye . 
j aty 4 eh Qe: Ea 
x : : ae h aes Fh | hy 
i Te ee eT 5 Salad bi 
¢ es j # ae 4 ig min OR ye 
ent y ee he 
6 ij ek 
% ; fF oa ite s 
, ‘ f F 
K 
Ms i H ‘ . . 
. . A * r-¢ * 
\ ty lint 
: a y y 
4 ‘ 
‘ 4 
{ ir 
° # 
j * 
oF \) > 


